Professor Ruth Dukes
- Professor of Labour Law (Law)
telephone:
01413306306
email:
Ruth.Dukes@glasgow.ac.uk
Room 211, Ground Level, 7 Professors Square
https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7515-0941Biography
Ruth Dukes is Professor of Labour Law and Deputy Director of Research in the School of Law. She joined the University of Glasgow in 2005 having graduated from the University of Edinburgh (LLB), the Humboldt University in Berlin (LLM), and the London School of Economics (PhD).
Professor Dukes is a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences and an emeritus member of the Young Academy of Scotland. She is Vice President of the Institute of Employment Rights. She is also a member of the Steering Committee of the Labour Law Research Network, the Adapt International Scientific Committee, the Project Board of the Jimmy Reid Foundation, and the Editorial Board of the Spanish Labour Law and Employment Relations Journal. In 2011/12 she was an Early Career Fellow of the Arts and Humanities Research Council, and a MacCormick Fellow at the University of Edinburgh. In 2022, she was the Innis Christie Visiting Professor at Dalhousie University in Canada. From 2018 until 2023, she held a European Research Council Starting Grant which funded the project Work on Demand: Contracting for Work in a Changing Economy.
Dukes is the author of The Labour Constitution: the Enduring Idea of Labour Law (Oxford University Press 2014) and, with Wolfgang Streeck, Democracy at Work: Contract, Status and Post-Industrial Justice (Polity 2023).
Research interests
Ruth Dukes’ research interests lie in the field of labour law, particularly collective labour law, and theories and systems of worker representation. She has published widely on trade union law, theories of labour law, employee information and consultation, and British, German and European labour history. She is known in particular for her work on the ‘founding fathers’ of the discipline of labour law: Hugo Sinzheimer, Otto Kahn-Freund, and Lord Wedderburn.
Working in collaboration with Wolfgang Streeck, Ruth is currently leading a project on Class Conflict and Institutional Change: Otto Kahn-Freund (1900-1979) and the Invention of Labour Law. The project investigates the invention of labour law as a distinct field of legal doctrine and scholarship. Invention and reinvention are understood here as ongoing processes, scholarly and political, involving the defence of existing institutions and the development of new ones. Employing the lens of the life and work of Otto Kahn-Freund (1900-1979), the project considers developments spanning the short twentieth century, from the end of the first world war to the struggle over the second postwar settlement in the 1970s and thereafter. Following Kahn-Freund, labour law scholarship is conceived as an interdisciplinary endeavour, combining insights from legal theory, the sociology of law, political economy, and empirically-oriented industrial relations. In particular, the project addresses two questions: How was legal scholarship on the conflict between capital and labour related to both contemporary history and simultaneous developments in the social sciences, and what may be learned from this today?
From 2018 until 2023, Ruth held a European Research Council Starting Grant for a project called Work on Demand: Contracting for Work in a Changing Economy. Working with a team of doctoral and postdoctoral researchers, she sought to analyse the ever-evolving nature of contracts and contracting behaviour in the world of work – not only contracts of employment, but also those of casual, ‘zero-hours’, and self-employed workers. For further information and publications see: https://workondemand.co.uk/
In 2014, a 5-year research project partly funded by the AHRC resulted in publication of The Labour Constitution: the Enduring Idea of Labour Law (Series: Oxford Monographs on Labour Law, OUP 2014). The project was conceived as a contribution to scholarly debates on the so-called crisis in labour law. Building on earlier work on the scholarship of Kahn-Freund and Sinzheimer, and combining historical, legal and socio-legal analysis, it sought to make the case for the continued relevance of foundational texts to the study of labour law today. In the course of doing so, it provided original accounts of the history of labour law and industrial relations in Germany, the UK, and the European Union, and an extended analysis of different approaches to study of the field.
The Labour Constitution: The Enduring Idea of Labour Law
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Runner-up of the SLSA Socio-Legal Theory and History Prize 2016 Read the Reviews and Awards of the book on the OUP webpages
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Publications
Selected publications
Dukes, R. (2014) The Labour Constitution: The Enduring Idea of Labour Law. Series: Oxford monographs on labour law. Oxford University Press: Oxford. ISBN 9780199601691 (doi: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199601691.001.0001)
Dukes, R. and Streeck, W. (2022) Democracy at Work: Contract, Status and Post-Industrial Justice. Polity Press: Cambridge. ISBN 9781509548989
Dukes, R. (2019) The economic sociology of labour law. Journal of Law and Society, 46(3), pp. 396-422. (doi: 10.1111/jols.12168)
Dukes, R. and Streeck, W. (2020) Labour constitutions and occupational communities: social norms and legal norms at work. Journal of Law and Society, 47(4), pp. 612-638. (doi: 10.1111/jols.12254)
Dukes, R. (2009) Otto Kahn-Freund and collective Laissez-Faire: an edifice without a keystone? Modern Law Review, 72(2), pp. 220-246. (doi: 10.1111/j.1468-2230.2009.00741.x)
All publications
Grants
Professor Dukes has been awarded several grants and fellowships including the following:
2024
With Julieta Lobato (as Researcher), an International Fellowship from the British Academy (£226,228).
2021
With Michel Coutu (University of Montreal), a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada grant ($67,343) to fund research on the New Labour Constitution.
2020
With Dr Gregoris Ioannou (as Researcher), a Marie Curie-Sklodowska Fellowship (c. €200,000).
2017
A Starting Grant (€1.42 million) from the European Research Council to finance a major five-year project: Work on Demand: Contracting for Work in a Changing Economy (WorkOD).
2011
An Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) Fellowship for research on the Constitutional Function of Labour Law (£65,675).
Supervision
Research students under supervision
- Saddington, Neil
Algorithmic Management: A proposed method for navigating a contested domain - Zhang, Qingqin
Workplace surveillance and protecting of worker’s privacy in the UK and China
