Dr Jack Meakin launches new project
TRACTION: Transnational Labour Constitutionalism. A study of the effectiveness of strategic litigation in supranational courts, transnational legal orders, and the constitutional protection of work.
The School of Law’s Dr Jack Meakin has launched his Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) New Investigator Grant funded project. The project is titled “TRACTION: Transnational Labour Constitutionalism. A study of the effectiveness of strategic litigation in supranational courts, transnational legal orders, and the constitutional protection of work”.
The project has three main objectives:
1. Map the contemporary constellation of transnational labour law regulation;
2. Analyse the potential effectiveness of transnational legal mobilisation as a mechanism for protecting vulnerable workers;
3. Evaluate the constitutional implications of transnational legal mobilisation.
This is a two year project and is funded by an ESRC New Investigator Grant. This research aims to provide original insights to academics, legal practitioners, and trade unions about the effectiveness of transnational litigation strategies.
TRACTION contributes to urgent debates about the relationship between citizens, national legal systems, and global political and legal institutions. This project responds to a significant gap in contemporary socio-legal studies and labour law scholarship by identifying the interdisciplinary opportunity to apply socio-legal analytic tools to doctrinal analysis of transnational labour law. Focusing on the mobilisation of transnational law, TRACTION will evaluate the extent to which transnational labour regimes provide effective mechanisms capable of channelling political and legal demands about the constitutional protection of work.
In June Dr Meakin edited a Special Issue of the International Journal of Comparative Labour Law and Industrial Relations - vol 38(2). The issue brings together practising labour lawyers with scholars in the fields of labour law, legal theory, socio-legal studies, and industrial relations to explore the myriad ways that trade unions, workers, and lawyers have mobilised law.
His contribution draws on legal theory and legal mobilisation scholarship to analyse the effectiveness of strategic litigation. He focuses on three issues: Inc/exclusionary effects of legal ordering on legal claims, state law’s institutional capacity and the relation between law and politics.
