Labour Law

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LSE holds a unique place in the birth and development of industrial relations and labour law in the UK. The School's founders, the Webbs, inventors of the term 'collective bargaining', laid the foundations for studying labour relations and their regulation in a broad social context. Labour law was taught at LSE from 1903 and comparative labour law from 1934, whilst no other UK university taught labour law until after the second World War. It was to LSE that Kahn-Freund came as a refugee from Germany in 1933 and, with his famous conceptualisation of Britain as a collective laissez-faire system, developed a sophisticated empirical and conceptual framework for thinking about labour law, one subsequently elaborated upon by, in particular, Lord Wedderburn and Paul Davies at LSE. While labour law and the labour market mutate rapidly, there is an enduring focus on the multiple sources of legislative and private norm production in labour law, how best to justify labour law, and which regulatory techniques can deliver its objectives.

 

 

Research Home

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Labour Law :

Faculty

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Professor Hugh Collins

Dr Wanjiru Njoya

 

 

Labour Law : Current Research

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The Industrial Law Journal, the leading UK journal in the field, is edited from the Department. Recent books published include H. Collins, Employment Law (OUP, 2003), H. Collins, K.D. Ewing and A. McColgan Labour Law: Text, Cases and Materials (Hart, 2nd edition, 2005), P. Davies and M. Freedland, Towards a flexible labour market (OUP, 2007).

LSE Law Department is an important focus for research in labour law through workshops. Recent examples include an international workshop on Reconstructing Employment Contracts in 2005 (Hugh Collins and Claire Kilpatrick) and a roundtable on European Labour Law in light of the European Commission's Green Paper on Labour Law in 2007 (Hugh Collins and Claire Kilpatrick). There is a flourishing doctoral community in labour law at LSE as well as taught graduate and undergraduate programmes.