Labour law is widely considered to be in crisis by scholars of the field. This crisis has an obvious external dimension - labour law is attacked for impeding efficiency, flexibility, and development; vilified for reducing employment and for favouring already well placed employees over less fortunate ones; and discredited for failing to cover the most vulnerable workers and workers in the "informal sector". These are just some of the external challenges to labour law. There is also an internal challenge, as labour lawyers themselves increasingly question whether their discipline is conceptually coherent, relevant to the new empirical realities of the world of work, and normatively salient in the world as we now know it.

This book responds to such fundamental challenges by asking the most fundamental questions: What is labour law for? How can it be justified? And what are the normative premises on which reforms should be based? There has been growing interest in such questions in recent years. In this volume the contributors seek to take this body of scholarship seriously and also to move it forward. Its aim is to provide, if not answers which satisfy everyone, intellectually nourishing food for thought for those interested in understanding, explaining and interpreting labour laws - whether they are scholars, practitioners, judges, policy-makers, or workers and employers.

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Guy Davidov is Vice-Dean and Elias Lieberman Chair in Labour Law at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He studied at Tel-Aviv University (LLB) and the University of Toronto (LLM, SJD) and has previously been a faculty member at the University of Haifa, before joining the Hebrew University in 2007. He is co-editor of the Israeli journal Labour, Society and Law, and a member of the executive board of the International Society for Labour Law and Social Security. He has published widely on labour law issues, especially dealing with the normative justifications for different labour regulations. Brian Langille is Professor of Law at the University of Toronto. He has twice served as Associate Dean (Graduate Studies), served as Acting Dean in 2003-04, and as Interim Dean in 2005. A native of Nova Scotia, he received a B.A. from Acadia, his LL.B from Dalhousie Law school, and the B.C.L. from Oxford. He taught at Dalhousie Law School prior to joining the University of Toronto in 1983. His numerous publications are concerned with labour law and legal theory. Professor Langille was a member of Canadian delegations to both the Governing Body and the International Labour Conference of the ILO (International Labour Organization), a consultant to the Federal and various provincial governments on domestic and international labour issues, a consultant to the ILO, and a Rapporteur to the OECD, and a member of the executive of the International Society for Labour Law and Social Security. He is an editor of the International Labour Law Reports, and a member of the Labour Law Casebook Group.