Category Archives: Employment and Labour Law
‘Consumer Protection for Gig Work?’
Amazon’s business depends on deliveries. Deliveries, in turn, require drivers. In 2015, Amazon piloted a new model: paying drivers per gig to use their own vehicles to drop off time-sensitive deliveries like groceries and same-day orders. Amazon offered $18 to $25 per hour and explicitly promised drivers ‘100% of the tips [they] earn’. But Amazon […]
Christopher Hampson, ‘Bankruptcy Fiduciaries’
ABSTRACT Does social enterprise end with insolvency? Is bankruptcy all about the bottom line? The answer to these questions begins with understanding the estate in bankruptcy and the fiduciaries that control its fate. Yet the law of fiduciary duties in bankruptcy is undertheorized, conflicted, and muddled. After almost fifty years of confusion, this Article provides […]
Yiran Zhang, ‘Home as Non-Workplace’
ABSTRACT Individuals have worked, are working, and will work in homes. During the COVID pandemic, the home was once the most common workplace. However, work law does not consistently treat the home as a workplace by default. Judges, politicians, and other lawmakers continue to entrench an ideological intuition that characterizes home as less coercive, less […]
Zambrano, Guha, Peters and Xia, ‘Private Enforcement in the States’
ABSTRACT Scholarship on US litigation and civil procedure has scarcely studied the role of private enforcement in the states. Over the past two decades, scholars have established that, almost uniquely in the world, the US often relies on private parties rather than administrative agencies to enforce important statutory provisions. Take your pick of any area […]
Emily Rose, ‘Informing a sociological jurisprudence of mutual trust and confidence’
ABSTRACT The aim of this paper is to inform a sociological jurisprudence of the implied duty in the contract of employment of mutual trust and confidence. Present analyses of the emerging term have been doctrinal in nature. Such scholarship contributes a normative internal perspective to what can be understood as the jurisprudential project of guarding […]
Hiraiwa, Lipsitz and Starr, ‘Do Firms Value Court Enforceability of Noncompete Agreements? A Revealed Preference Approach’
ABSTRACT We study whether firms value court enforceability of their workers’ noncompete agreements (NCAs), leveraging a 2020 Washington law that made NCAs unenforceable for workers earning less than a threshold of $100k per year (indexed to inflation), covering approximately 79% of Washing-ton workers. If firms value the ability to enforce NCAs in court, then they […]
Zambrano, Guha, Peters and Xia, ‘Private Enforcement in the States’
ABSTRACT Scholarship on US litigation and civil procedure has scarcely studied the role of private enforcement in the states. Over the past two decades, scholars have established that, almost uniquely in the world, the US often relies on private parties rather than administrative agencies to enforce important statutory provisions. Take your pick of any area […]
Deborah Zalesne, ‘Gender Inequality in Contracts Casebooks: Representations of Women in the Contracts Curriculum’
ABSTRACT Gender has always explicitly or implicitly played a critical role in contracting and in contracts opinions – from the early nineteenth century, when married women lacked the legal capacity altogether to contract, through the next century, when women gained the right to contract but continued to lack bargaining power and to be disadvantaged in […]
‘Private Law Perspectives on the Contract of Employment’, University College London, 7 June 2024
The UCL Private Law Group are pleased to announce a one-day conference on Private Law Perspectives on the Contract of Employment, Friday 7th June 2024, from 09:30 to 5pm, at University College London. This conference will develop a dialogue between private lawyers and labour lawyers on theoretical and practical issues as they relate to the […]
Paul Weitzel, ‘The Case Against Officer Fiduciary Duties’
ABSTRACT This article argues that fiduciary duties owed by officer to shareholders are counterproductive, theoretically unsound and unnecessary in practice. Using experimental data from behavioral ethics research, the article shows that fiduciary duties expand the range of morally justifiable behavior, which increases self-serving transactions. This harm is not offset by the constraints created by fiduciary […]