What Exactly is Happening to the Contract of Employment? Reflections on Mark Freedland and Nicola Kountouris's Legal Construction of Personal Work Relations

This is a multi-layered and complex book. It can be read at a number of levels: as a recasting of core concepts in the English law of employment; as a comparative legal analysis which reveals the deep legal structure of work relations in several European systems; and as a reformulation of normative justifications for worker-protective labor law. In its fusion of comparative legal analysis with conceptual exegesis it has few equivalents in labor law scholarship, one being Otto Kahn-Freund’s Labour and the Law.1 Mark Freedland and Nicola Kountouris cover a huge amount of ground and are generous in acknowledging and citing to the work of others, while presenting an argument that is entirely their own. This turns on a particular critique of contemporary labor law’s central organizing concept, the contract of employment. The authors propose a new cognitive map for labor law which would no longer have the employment...