Juridification Of Social Spheres

The bulk of the contributions in this publication originated in a research project initiated by the Stellenbosch Institute for Advanced Study (STIAS) in 2002. The book is based on the idea that the attainment of greater social and economic justice, specifically in the South African context, is strongly influenced by the implications and the coherence of various theories of social and economic justice.

Traditionally,the theory of human rights limited its application to the public domain, namely the relationships between individuals and public authorities. The great expansion of human rights legislation and concepts in modern national and international law has given rise to a major issue relating to their potential impact on private relationships. This book examines this important topic, which may revolutionize private law. It presents new approaches which strive to broaden the application of human rights to the private field on the ground that power can be abused and human rights can be infringed even when all parties are private. The subject is examined from theoretical and comparative perspectives by leading scholars representing a diversity of legal systems - the United States, Canada, England, South Africa, Germany and Israel. Among the contributors are Professor Todd Rakoff (Harvard), Professor Roger Brownsword (Sheffield), Professor Hugh Beale (Warwick) and Professor Ewan McKendrick (Oxford), Professor Ernest Weinrib and Professor Lorraine Weinrib (Toronto), Professor Christian Starck (Gottingen), Professor Andreas Heldrich (Munich) and others.

To what extent is labour law an autonomous field of study? This book is based upon the papers written by a group of leading international scholars on this theme, delivered at a conference to mark Professor Mark Freedland's retirement from his teaching fellowship in Oxford. The chapters explore the boundaries and connections between labour law and other legal disciplines such as company law, competition law, contract law and public law; labour law and legal methodologies such as reflexive governance and comparative law; and labour law and other disciplines such as ethics, economics and political philosophy. In so doing, it represents a cross-section of the most sophisticated current work at the cutting edge of labour law theory.

One of the world's leading scholars of EU employment law proposes alternatives to the Union's current social and labour policies.

Winner of the SLS Peter Birks Prize for Outstanding Legal Scholarship 2010. The long ascendancy of pluralism and 'collective laissez-faire' as a guiding ideology of British labour law was emphatically shattered by the New Right ideology of Thatcher and Major. When New Labour was finally returned to power in 1997, it did not, however, attempt to resurrect the pre-Thatcher preference for pluralist non-intervention in collective industrial relations. Instead, it purported to follow a 'Third Way'. A centrepiece of this new approach was the statutory recognition provision, introduced in Schedule A1 TULRCA 1992. By breaking with the tradition of voluntarism in respect of recognition of trade unions, New Labour sought to provide a model of collective labour law which combined legal support with control through juridification. A closer study of both the history of approaches to recognition and the current provisions opens up fundamental questions as to the nature of this new model and the ones it aimed to replace. This book uses political philosophy to elucidate the character of those historical approaches and the nature of the 'Third Way' itself in relation to statutory union recognition. In particular, it traces the progressive eclipse of civic republican values in labour law, in preference for a liberal political philosophy. The book articulates and defends a civic republican philosophy in terms of freedom as non-domination, the intrinsic value of democratic participation through deliberative democracy, and community. This can be contrasted with the rights-based individualism and State neutrality characteristic of the liberal approach. Despite the promise of civic community in the 'Third Way' rhetoric, this book demonstrates that the reality of New Labour's experiment in union recognition was an emphatic reassertion of liberalism in the sphere of workers' collective rights. This is the first monograph to offer a sustained critical analysis of legal approaches to trade union recognition. It will be of particular interest to labour lawyers, but also a wider audience of scholars in political philosophy and industrial relations.

This book explores the normative and legal evolution of the Social Dimension - labour law, social security law and family law - in both the EU and its Member States, during the last decade. It does this from a wide range of theoretical and legal-substantive perspectives. The past decade has witnessed the entering into force of the Lisbon Treaty and its emphasis on fundamental rights, a new coordination regulation within the field of social security (Regulation 883/2004/EC), and the case law of the Court of Justice of the European Union in the so-called Laval Quartet. Furthermore structural changes affecting demographics and family have also challenged solidarity in new ways. The book is organised by reference to distinct 'normative patterns' and their development in the fields of law covered, such as the protection of established groups, the position of market functional values and the scope for just distribution. The book represents an innovative and important interdisciplinary approach to analysing EU law and Social Europe, and contributes a complex, yet thought-provoking, picture for the future. The contributors represent an interesting mix of well-known and distinguished as well as upcoming and promising researchers throughout Europe and beyond.