Labour Law and Transnational Law: the Fate of Legal Fields & the Trajectory of Legal Scholarship

In this lecture, I’m going to explain how and why I came to write my article, The Law of Economic Subordination and Resistance. I hope that by doing so, I will be able to shed some light not only on my own field of labour law, but on the larger problem of how legal fields or domains of legal knowledge, come into existence, change or become obsolete, and in the end are either transformed or superseded altogether. I will be talking about labour law, but I hope you will be thinking about transnational law. I’m going to try to persuade you that the invention and transformation of these two fields have something in common. But I’m going to go further. I hope to convince you that their ultimate fate is determined by some of the very same forces. Transnational law, I am going to argue, can only survive if it learns from the short, sad history of labour law.