Comment: Ruth Dukes on Wedderburn and Kahn-Freund

Abstract

This short note records and slightly expands upon my comments on Ruth Dukes’ paper to the Conference on the Academic Scholarship and Legacy of Bill Wedderburn; I leave those comments in the form of an address to the conference itself, in the hope that this will convey the spontaneity of my reactions to the deliberations of the conference itself. We are having a very rich day of discussion of Bill Wedderburn’s labour law scholarship, and, as Bob Hepple and Simon Deakin predicted at the outset, it has been especially enriched by the productive distance which the passing of the years has already placed between Wedderburn’s work and the experience of the younger scholars who have given the two main papers today. A central and suitable pre-occupation of today’s papers has been the relationship between the labour law scholarship of Wedderburn and that of Otto Kahn-Freund. I myself, having first met both Wedderburn and Kahn-Freund just about 50 years ago when they were already, respectively, the young and the old grand master of British labour law studies, find it difficult to achieve any degree of productive distance from them; but perhaps on the other hand from that proximity, I can add a couple of incidental notes to Dukes’ very insightful analysis of the ways in which Wedderburn’s work in the field of labour law can be differentiated from that of Kahn-Freund. One such note concerns their significantly different formative experiences of the law in general, and the other concerns their somewhat different formative disciplinary affiliations within the law.