EMPLOYMENT LAW
(Convenors: Dr Diamond Ashiagbor & Ms Lizzie Barmes)
This full subject option will consider the law governing the employment relationship.
Students will be encouraged not only to understand the relevant legal rules, but also to
analyze the wider significance of employment law in reflecting and in shaping society
and the economy.
The course will be structured around the different levels at which the employment
relationship is regulated. It will use specific topics in order to illuminate the ways that
systems of inter-governmental international law (like the ILO or the Council of Europe),
supra-national law (like the EU), domestic common law (like the common law of the
contract of employment), domestic statutory law (like the statutory right not to be
unfairly dismissed) and sub-domestic systems of regulation (like the firm, systems of
collective bargaining and the informal economy) structure working lives (and life more
generally).
This approach will facilitate a highly imaginative and contextual analysis of the law.
None of the rigour of legal reasoning will be lost, but students will be asked to think
creatively about the legal tools studied from a range of evaluative and critical
perspectives. So the aim will be, not only for you to gain insight into the substance and
the mechanisms of employment law, but to have a deep understanding of how these
interact with social, economic and political developments.
There are considerable overlaps and complementarities between this subject and others
that you will already have studied and will study in your third year. It has important links
to public law and especially the human rights component of that subject, European law,
equality law, contract law and jurisprudence. The course also combines, on the one hand,
a highly practical side, in that employment law is a burgeoning area of legal practice, and,
on the other hand, being both personal and political, in that employment law engages at
one and the same time with the daily lives of individuals and the political and economic
life of the nation.
Assessment: Unseen examination paper (two and a half hours) in May.
If you have any questions, please don't hesitate to contact either Diamond Ashiagbor on
d.ashiagbor@ucl.ac.uk or Lizzie Barmes on l.barmes@ucl.ac.uk.