Professor Rebecca Zahn

Law

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Personal statement

My main research interests and specialisation lie in European, national and comparative labour and employment law. I am currently working on the relationship between historical studies and labour law in order to understand the development of labour/employment laws and their role in society. I was awarded a Leverhulme Research Fellowship in 2021 for a project entitled ‘Revealing the Importance of Ideas: The Intellectual History of Labour Law’. The project compares the different debates taking place on worker representation on company boards in German and British intellectual circles at a critical historical juncture in the 1940s. It uses these debates as a case study to trace the movement of legal ideas across national boundaries, and to explore alternative narratives which have escaped legal attention. The eventual aim of the project is to provide a better understanding of the intellectual history of labour laws which should facilitate a deeper and more nuanced understanding of labour laws’ origins and their distinctiveness. I teach EU law, labour law, commercial law and Scots contract law, and have previously also taught delict (tort). I am the book review editor for the Industrial Law Journal, a case and comment editor for the Juridical Review (the Law Journal of the Scottish Universities) and an editor of Green's Employment Law Bulletin. I am on the Research Committe of the Institute of Advanced Legal Studies, the management board of the Scottish Universities Legal Network on Europe (SULNE) and am one of the lead academics in the Civil Society Brexit Project, funded by the Legal Education Foundation until 2022, which helps civil society organisations in Scotland to prepare for Brexit consequences for themselves or their service users.

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Professional Activities

Human Rights Consortium Scotland (External organisation)
Member
2023
PhD Thesis External Examiner
Examiner
28/11/2022
Republicanism and Labor Justice
Invited speaker
2022
SLS Annual Conference
Keynote/plenary speaker
2022
UACES Annual Conference
Speaker
2022
Modern Law Review (Journal)
Peer reviewer
2022

More professional activities

Projects

The History of Law and Labour in Scotland
Zahn, Rebecca (Principal Investigator)
01-Sep-2024 - 30-Jun-2025
Revealing the Importance of Ideas: The Intellectual History of Labour Law
Zahn, Rebecca (Principal Investigator)
01-May-2022 - 31-Oct-2024
Future-Mapping EU Integration: Inter-disciplinary approaches to connecting EU Law, policy & politics
Zahn, Rebecca (Principal Investigator)
01-Feb-2022 - 30-Jun-2025
Empowering civil society in Scotland to engage in Brexit-related constitutional change
Zahn, Rebecca (Co-investigator) Busby, Nicole (Co-investigator) Fletcher, Maria (Co-investigator)
01-Sep-2019 - 31-Aug-2022
Exiled influences on German codetermination
Zahn, Rebecca (Principal Investigator)
01-Jun-2019 - 31-May-2020
Civil Society and Brexit
Busby, Nicole (Principal Investigator) Zahn, Rebecca (Principal Investigator)
This joint venture between Human Rights Consortium Scotland (HRCS; a network of Scottish civil society organisations) and Scottish Universities Legal Network for Europe (SULNE) will deliver a programme of events, trainings, briefings, and information alerts tailored to the needs of civil society organisations in Scotland.
By bringing together the civil society contacts, networking, capacity building and collaborative approach of HRCS, with the legal and educational expertise of SULNE and its capacity for knowledge generation, this project will empower the Scottish third sector to engage with the process of the “EU (Withdrawal) Bill” at Westminster and in Scotland and the wider Brexit discussions. The advice generated will be politically neutral and unbiased. Findings from the project will be used to inform published research output. Impact of the project and related output on participating civil society organisations and on the third sector generally will be mapped and recorded as the project progresses.
03-Jul-2017 - 28-Jun-2019

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Contact

Professor Rebecca Zahn
Law

Email: rebecca.zahn@strath.ac.uk
Tel: 548 3244