Category Archives: Employment and Labour Law
ACL Davies, ‘Implied Terms in the Contract of Employment ‘
ABSTRACT In this article, I offer a critical analysis of the current state of the law on implied terms in the contract of employment, drawing inspiration from Sir Patrick Elias’s decided cases and academic writing on the topic. Implied terms provide an important opportunity to develop the protective function of the contract of employment to […]
Agnese Palumbo, ‘Bound to a mast: matelotage and the queer contract in Shakespeare’s maritime plays’
ABSTRACT Analyzing the language of a 1699 matelotage contract and locating that same terminology in Shakespeare’s maritime plays, this article argues that there is a thematic and genealogical link between the contractual forms of homosocial union that existed during the premodern and early modern periods and the bonds shared by male characters in those plays […]
Sandra Fredman, ‘Equal Pay: Navigating the Thicket’
ABSTRACT Despite over 50 years of equal pay legislation in the UK, the gender pay gap stubbornly persists. This is in part due to its dependence on an individual complaints system demonstrably ill-suited to the task, both because respondents have been able to utilize procedural requirements to delay and prolong claims, and because of the […]
Will Mbioh, ‘Mapping Precarity: How the UK Supreme Court Redistributes Risk and Value in the Gig Economy’
ABSTRACT Dominant labour-law commentary treats gig-economy litigation as a cartographic exercise: are drivers and couriers being ‘correctly’ mapped into the statutory boxes of employee, worker, or independent contractor? Drawing on critical labour law theories of law’s constitutive power, this article shifts the focus from misclassification to the political economy. Using the UK Supreme Court’s twin […]
Mohseni and Gomes, ‘Vicarious Liability and the Triumph of Form in Bird: Coming Home to Roost?
ABSTRACT In Bird v DP, the High Court confined vicarious liability to relationships of employment. This was a triumph of formalism, out of step with history and principle. While the Court was rightly hesitant to follow England and Canada, where vicarious liability has been imposed using nebulous policy considerations, the better approach was to continue […]
Simon Deakin, ‘Judging in the Common Law Tradition: Sir Patrick Elias on Employment Status’
ABSTRACT Sir Patrick Elias occupies a unique position in modern British employment law as an academic, practitioner and judge during the period of its expansion from the 1970s to the present day. His insistence on the need for conceptual clarity in legal reasoning has helped prevent the law falling into atrophy and confusion during a […]
Jordyn Selznick, ‘Enrichment, Exploitation, and the Evasion of Responsibility: A Proposal to Apply the Equitable Doctrine of Unjust Enrichment to Bridge the Accountability Gap and Provide Remedies to the Victims of Forced Labour Abroad’
ABSTRACT The International Labour Organization reported in 2021 that 17.3 million people globally were forced labourers in the private sector. As came to light in the Supreme Court of Canada’s decision in Nevsun Resources Ltd v Araya, Canadian multinational corporations (‘MNCs’) have used, and continue to use, forced labourers within their global supply chains. Several […]
Joe Atkinson, ‘Taking Human Rights Seriously at Work: The Past, Present and Future of Employment Law’
ABSTRACT Human rights are increasingly adopted as a perspective on employment law and the regulation of work. Yet there remains a lack of clarity over key questions such as how the relationship between employment law and human rights should be understood, why human rights law has had limited impact in this context and whether/how it […]
James Davey, ‘The Lost Promise of Compulsory Employers’ Liability Insurance: A Tragedy in Three Acts’
ABSTRACT Compulsory insurance for workplace injuries has been in place in the United Kingdom for more than five decades. The political pressure to introduce mandatory cover, and to criminalise failures to do so, followed notorious workplace fires. But politicians and academic commentators at the time noted that the legislation introduced did not correct the very […]
Guy Davidov, ‘A Theory of the Contract of Employment’
ABSTRACT The law of the contract of employment has been described as a field based on the idea of contract but shaped by the influence of labour legislation. The article proposes a theory that justifies a specific version of this fusion, offering a principled foundation for the judicial development of the law and for interpreting […]