Professor Rebecca Zahn
Law
Personal statement
My main research interests and specialisation lie in European, national and comparative labour 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 the extent to which they are distinct. 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 compared 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 used 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. I have broad experience of teaching across a wide range of undergraduate and postgraduate subjects, including EU law, labour/employment law, commercial law, delict (tort) and Scots contract law. I am the book review editor for the Industrial Law Journal, and am on the Research Committee of the Institute of Advanced Legal Studies. Together with Prof Elaine Fahey and Dr Fabien Terpan, I coordinate the EUFutures research network funded by UACES and the John Madison Charitable Trust (2022-2025).
Prize And Awards
- Visiting Professorship Sciences Po Grenoble
- Recipient
- 1/2023
- International Researcher Scholarship, Max Planck Institute for comparative and international private law
- Recipient
- 2022
- Fellow of the Higher Education Academy
- Recipient
- 2021
- Runner-up of the International Labor and Employment Relations Associations' Luis Aparicio Prize
- Recipient
- 2018
- Convenor of the Labour Law Section of the Society of Legal Scholars
- Recipient
- 2015
- Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities Non-stipendiary Fellow
- Recipient
- 1/6/2014
Publications
- Europäisches Arbeitsrecht
- Schiek Dagmar, Zahn Rebecca
- (2025)
- Discovering the contributions of academic wives to the development of labour law : Liesel Kahn-Freund
- Zahn Rebecca, Kullmann Miriam
- Industrial Law Journal Vol 54, pp. 1-23 (2025)
- https://doi.org/10.1093/indlaw/dwae011
- Introduction : Special Issue: EU law in the era of digitisation: on strategic litigation causes, actors and processes
- Fahey Elaine, Terpan Fabien, Zahn Rebecca
- Nordic Journal of European Law Vol 7, pp. 1-7 (2025)
- The status of European Works Councils in UK law post-Brexit : a commentary on EasyJet PLC v EasyJet European Works Council and Olsten (UK) Holdings Limited v Adecco Group European Works Council
- Zahn Rebecca
- Industrial Law Journal Vol 53, pp. 746-761 (2024)
- https://doi.org/10.1093/indlaw/dwae037
- Die Zukunft Europäischer Betriebsräte im Vereinigten Königreich nach dem Brexit
- Zahn Rebecca
- Arbeit und Recht Vol 2024, pp. 456-460 (2024)
- Less than zero? The fragmentation of worker protection in UK employment law
- Busby Nicole, Zahn Rebecca
- Comparative Labor Law and Policy Journal Vol 44, pp. 1-22 (2024)
Professional Activities
- Founders and Shapers of Labour Law
- Organiser
- 2024
- Human Rights Consortium Scotland (External organisation)
- Member
- 2023
- PhD Thesis External Examiner
- Examiner
- 28/11/2022
- Culture and Work
- Participant
- 2022
- Republicanism and Labor Justice
- Invited speaker
- 2022
- SLS Annual Conference
- Keynote/plenary speaker
- 2022
Projects
- The History of Law and Labour in Scotland
- Zahn, Rebecca (Principal Investigator)
- 01-Jan-2024 - 30-Jan-2025
- Revealing the Importance of Ideas: The Intellectual History of Labour Law
- Zahn, Rebecca (Principal Investigator)
- 01-Jan-2022 - 31-Jan-2024
- Future-Mapping EU Integration: Inter-disciplinary approaches to connecting EU Law, policy & politics
- Zahn, Rebecca (Principal Investigator)
- 01-Jan-2022 - 30-Jan-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-Jan-2019 - 31-Jan-2022
- Exiled influences on German codetermination
- Zahn, Rebecca (Principal Investigator)
- 01-Jan-2019 - 31-Jan-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-Jan-2017 - 28-Jan-2019