A Purposive Approach to Labour Law

Abstract

Labour law has a strong tradition of theoretical scholarship, which remains very much alive today. Recently there has been particular interest in the idea or purpose of labour law, with a divide between those who see the traditional ways of understanding labour law as outdated or increasingly irrelevant, and those who think that it merely needs reinvigorating rather than replacing. Guy Davidov’s monograph ‘A Purposive Approach to Labour Law’ makes an important contribution to this strand of scholarship, taking the side of those attempting to refresh our familiar views of labour law’s aims. The book surveys the literature on the purposes of labour law at the same time as setting out Davidov’s own perspective on how labour law’s goals should be understood. But more than this, by bringing this understanding of labour law’s aims to bear on some of the pressing issues currently facing labour law Davidov demonstrates how the gap between theory and practice can be bridged.