Professor Mark Freedland receives Bob Hepple Award for Lifetime Achievement in Labour Law

The Faculty of Law is delighted to announce that Emeritus Professor Mark Freedland FBA was one of two recipients of the Bob Hepple Award for Lifetime Achievement in Labour Law 2019 awarded by the Labour Law Research Network (LLRN). The award was presented at a ceremony at the LLRN conference in Valparaiso, Chile.

According to the LLRN, ‘The goal of the Award is to acknowledge exceptional and longstanding contributions to labour law scholarship. Such recognition from the global community of labour law scholars, which the LLRN represents, is intended to be meaningful both for the Award recipients and for the community bestowing this honour.’

Mark Freedland
Professor Freedland was appointed Fellow and Tutor in Law at St John’s College, Oxford, in 1970. His first book, The Contract of Employment, published in 1976, was a ground-breaking work, offering a detailed analysis of the legal construction and social effects of the contract of employment as the central building-block of employment law. This laid the foundations for a lifetime of scholarly enquiry into personal work relations, including (among many other publications) The Personal Employment Contract (2005), The Legal Construction of Personal Work Relations (2011), co-authored with Nicola Kountouris, and The Contract of Employment (2016), of which he was the lead editor. Freedland is also well-known for his work in the political and legal history of labour law, Labour Legislation and Public Policy (1993) and Towards a Flexible Labour Market (2007), both co-authored with Paul Davies. Freedland has also made substantial contributions to public law scholarship, through his work on ‘agencification’ and contracting out in public services, and more recently on the Brexit process.

Freedland has taught labour law in Oxford over many years, at both undergraduate and postgraduate level, continuing to teach even after officially retiring from his university post, and has supervised a large number of research students, many of whom now occupy academic positions in leading universities. His approach to scholarship – both rigorous and humane – and his wise advice have done much to inspire successive generations of labour law scholars in the UK and around the world. He is a worthy recipient of the Bob Hepple Award.

Anne Davies