Modern Social and Legal History (20625)

• Academic year: 2010-2011
• Year : 1
• Term: 1
• Number of ECTS credits: 6 Student hours: 150

 

Syllabus

The new Degree in Labour Relations syllabus includes a course linked with the subject area of History of Law and Institutions (shared with the History area of the Humanities Department), called Modern Social and Legal History. It is an unmistakably multidisciplinary course and is focussed as follows: students work in two different contexts, the first being the origins of the legal institutions making up employment law, (employment contracts, trade union relations, social security etc.) and their legal and jurisprudential regulation in official and practical aspects. The second, which runs parallel to this, is the analysis of the transformation of the industrialisation processes and the economic changes which led to the legal regulation of labour relations, which is to say, to the formation of employment law.

It is clear that the legal regulating of labour relations can be approached with different focuses and purposes. On this course the aim is to offer a perspective on the historical regulating of labour relations, focussing attention on legal ideas, which are understood to mean more immediately operational judgements or assessments, which serve as a basis for the provisions making up employment law in different historical periods. The two axes which form the basis for the course contents and methodology are therefore history of law and the development of major social and historical processes. The overall objective is to encourage students to broaden their perspectives with regard to issues pertaining to the many branches which make up modern law. We aim to encourage students to develop their abilities to understand and comment on historical texts and deepen their knowledge of language and, more specifically, of legal and history-related terminology.

Students will also learn to assess the historical vicissitudes of their community and state and understand the reasons for the latter's complex legal-political organisation, and which contributed to the creation of employment law.

Contents section 1. The development of civil and political rights (constitutionalism in the XIX and XX centuries)

Contents section 2. History of the employment contract

Contents section 3. The trade union movement

Contents section 4. The welfare system in the world of work

Contents section 5. The building of the welfare state