Workers
Abstract
This article explores the past and future of scholarship in labour law. It is organized as follows. Section 2 addresses the formation and regulation of individual employment contracts, but its primary concern is the law that enables or disables the transformation of the individual contract into collective bargaining. After the 1960s, the dominant frameworks' treatment of collective and individual labour relations faced four sources of disruption: chronic failures in the implementation of existing statutes (Section 3); legislative enactments that cut against or fall outside the scholarly consensus (Section 4); growing disjunctures between existing labour-law regimes and fast-changing political economy (Section 5); and insurgent intellectual movements (Section 6). Section 7 describes two concepts that increasingly animate legal scholarship - pragmatism and reflexivity.