Abstract
AbstractLabor law scholars have been receptive to socio legal methods, going beyond doctrinal legal sources and looking to other disciplines including industrial relations, sociology, and history. This Article revisits the development of socio legal labor law scholarship in Germany and the UK in order to understand the different approaches within the context of two different legal and academic cultures, and considers how a comparison can provide new insights at a time when the discipline is in a state of flux. In particular, this Article focuses on how history can provide an entrée into different ways of comparing labor law and labor relations systems. It seeks to start a methodological debate on “how to do” labor law history within the context of the discipline’s socio legal origins. In a final section, it uses insights from history and comparative law in order to develop a new methodology—a “minor comparativism”—which unearths the processes and influences underpinning the historical development of labor law which have hitherto escaped the legal record. Such an approach enables scholars to reassess traditional narratives—a worthwhile endeavor at a time when the future role of labor law in regulating work is under scrutiny.
Highlights
Labor law scholars have been receptive to socio legal methods, going beyond doctrinal legal sources and looking to other disciplines including industrial relations, sociology, and history. This Article revisits the development of socio legal labor law scholarship in Germany and the UK in order to understand the different approaches within the context of two different legal and academic cultures, and considers how a comparison can provide new insights at a time when the discipline is in a state of flux
There is a recognition, amongst British labor law scholars, that “old ways of thinking about the subject, of describing and analyzing it, [seem] increasingly inadequate, but new ways have yet to be found.”2. Contributing to this special issue provides an opportunity to revisit the development of socio-legal labor law scholarship in Germany and the UK, to understand the different approaches within the context of two different legal and academic cultures, and to consider how a comparison can provide new insights at a time when the discipline is in a state of flux
Since the 1960s, there has been a rise in labor history scholarship which has looked at working-class experience more broadly where topics overlap with labor law
Summary
There is an established tradition of socio-legal labor law scholarship which emerged first in Germany, and later in the UK. As Ramm explains, “[a]fter 1945 labor law was deprived of its left wing politics and Jewish scholars; it was a labor law in which the force of the workers’ movement was lacking, as was the social issue.” A change in approach only occurred in the 1970s when a group of younger scholars reignited the Methodenstreit of the inter-war years by calling for labor law to consider the law as it exists in society.21 This group of scholars—the “labour law left” (die arbeitsrechtliche Linke), a minority in labor law scholarship—presented their arguments as a rigorous rebuttal of the majority’s legal dogmatic arguments. The resulting multi-disciplinary labor law scholarship sought to analyze and explain legal rules within their social context This particular type of British labor law scholarship had its heyday in the 1960s, it produced an extended generation of labor law scholars who followed in Kahn-Freund’s footsteps.. As a prerequisite for this approach, the section reviews the labor law history scholarship in Germany and the UK
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