Book Review: PAUL DAVIES and MARK FREEDLAND, Towards a Flexible Labour Market: Labour Legislation and Regulation since the 1990s. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007, 290 pp., ISBN 0199217874, £24.95
| Published date | 01 June 2008 |
| Date | 01 June 2008 |
| DOI | 10.1177/09646639080170020703 |
| Author | Ruth Dukes |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
Moreover, the potential for development of concepts of unfairness, including those
within the Unfair Terms in Consumer Contracts Regulations 1999, to address gender
differential impacts in contract law is yet to be fully explored. Nonetheless, each
chapter in Feminist Perspectives on Contract Law illuminates the less visible male-
centric aspects of contract law, renewing and introducing feminist approaches that
enrich historical, jurisprudential and theoretical understandings that have relevance
for broader aspects of law.
CASES CITED
Adams v. Lindsell (1818) 1 B. & Ald. 680
Baird Textile Holdings Ltd v Marks & Spencer plc [2001] EWCA Civ 274
Investors Compensation Scheme Ltd. v. West Bromwich Building Society [1998]
1 WLR 896
REFERENCES
Graycar, R. and J. Morgan (2002) The Hidden Gender of Law. 2nd edn. Sydney: The
Federation Press.
Held, V. (1993) Feminist Morality: Transforming Culture, Society and Politics. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press.
DERMOT FEENAN
University of Ulster, UK
PAUL DAVIES and MARK FREEDLAND, Towards a Flexible Labour Market: Labour
Legislation and Regulation since the 1990s. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007,
290 pp., ISBN 0199217874, £24.95.
Towards a Flexible Labour Marketis the sequel to Paul Davies and Mark Freedland’s
seminal work on the development of labour law and policy in the decades following
the Second World War, Labour Legislation and Public Policy. It picks up where the
former book left off, in the early 1990s, but focuses, for the most part, on the legis-
lation and policy of the Blair Governments from 1997 to 2007. As in Labour Legis-
lation and Public Policy, the aim of the authors is to provide an analysis and critique,
and not a comprehensive summary, of that legislation and policy. In terms of organiz-
ation, the analysis is presented in three main chapters, the first dealing with individual
labour law (‘the legal regulation of personal work relations’), the second with collec-
tive labour law, and the third with measures and policies aimed at the promotion of
work or employment. Characteristically thoughtful and carefully argued, Towards a
Flexible Labour Market advances an evaluation of labour legislation and policy under
the Blair Governments which is likely to be regarded as authoritative for many years
to come.
As is fitting of a sequel, Towards a Flexible Labour Market opens with a brief
review of the authors’ earlier volume, Labour Legislation and Public Policy. In that
book, the framework chosen to explain and evaluate the legislation and policies at issue
was that of collective laissez-faire. The history of post-war labour law and policy, as
told by Davies and Freedland, was one of ‘change around and then away from the
collective laissez-faire approach’ (p. 2). ‘Collective laissez-faire’, as the authors
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