Category Archives: Employment and Labour Law
Rebecca Zietlow, ‘Slavery, Liberty and the Right to Contract’
ABSTRACT This article explores what the right to contract meant to slaves, free blacks and northern workers before and after the Civil War, to uncover the lost history of liberty of contract under the Thirteenth Amendment. By abolishing slavery and involuntary servitude, the Thirteenth Amendment transformed United States labor law and expanded rights for all […]
Camilla Hrdy, ‘Intellectual Property and the End of Work’
ABSTRACT The conventional wisdom is that intellectual property (IP) is good for jobs. Indeed, according to legislators and the US patent office, IP ‘creates jobs’. But this is not quite right. A primary function of IP is to increase the amount of innovation in the economy. Yet a significant subset of the innovations protected by […]
Peter Quon, ‘Case Comment: Heller v Uber Technologies Inc’
ABSTRACT In Heller v Uber Technologies Inc, the Ontario Court of Appeal held that the arbitration clause contained in the agreement between Uber and its drivers was invalid on two separate grounds. First, the clause amounted to an illegal contracting out of the Employment Standards Act. Second, the Court held that the clause was unconscionable. […]
Michael Connolly, ‘Lee v Ashers Baking and its Ramifications for Employment Law’
INTRODUCTION … This highly publicised case on a bakery’s refusal to supply a cake iced with the words ‘Support Gay Marriage’ concerned discrimination on the grounds of political opinion and sexual orientation, and with it the bakery’s rights to free expression and religion. The case arose in the provision of goods, facilities and services (‘services’), […]
Andre Louw, ‘“The Common Law Is … not what It used to be”: Revisiting Recognition of a Constitutionally-Inspired Implied Duty of Fair Dealing in the Common Law Contract of Employment’
ABSTRACT This piece, which is in three parts, will revisit the importation of fairness into the employment contract (outside and independent of the fairness-based provisions of our labour legislation) by a line of Supreme Court of Appeal (SCA) judgments during the 2000s. This process culminated in the recognition of an ‘implied duty of fair dealing’ […]
‘UCTD applicable to other than employment contracts concluded between employees and employers – CJEU in Pouvin (C-590/17)’
“The CJEU supported today the AG Bobek’s opinion in the case Pouvin (C-590/17) that the notion of consumers and sellers from the Unfair Contract Terms Directive should be interpreted broadly. This means that also employees (and their spouses) who are acquiring a loan from their employers should be seen as consumers when these loans are […]
Collins, Lester and Mantouvalou, ‘Does Labour Law Need Philosophical Foundations? (Introduction)’
ABSTRACT This is the introductory chapter of the book Philosophical Foundations of Labour Law (Collins, Lester, Mantouvalou eds, OUP, 2018). It argues that labour law needs philosophical foundations and explains that careful reflection about underlying moral and political principles and values can serve to provide firm foundations and a clear sense of direction for labour […]
Joe Atkinson, ‘Implied Terms and Human Rights in the Contract of Employment’
ABSTRACT This article considers the potential for implied terms in the contract of employment to protect employees’ human rights. The slim prospects of legislative action in this area make it important to consider common law means of protecting human rights at work. Part 2 begins by setting out the function of implied terms in the […]
‘Understanding Vicarious Liability In Tort – The Value Of A Comparative Perspective’
“In this blog, I will discuss two recent publications which address comparatively the doctrine of vicarious liability in tort and demonstrate the value of a comparative perspective in this field. Vicarious liability is a rule of responsibility which is found across the common law of tort and typically renders an employer strictly liable for the […]
‘Article 8 and the “outside world”: privacy, reputation and employment’
“The Article 8 right to respect for private life has many facets and has often seemed in danger of uncontrolled expansion. The Court of Human Rights has often noted that private life is ‘not susceptible to exhaustive definition’, embracing ‘multiple aspects of the person’s physical and social identity’. There are numerous statements in the cases […]