Dr Rebecca Zahn

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.