Valuing Employment Rights A Study of Remedies in Employment Law.

This book gives new insights into employment law by analysing a neglected remedies for breaches of employment rights. It explores remedies in the wider context of compliance with, and enforcement of, employment law through criminal law and other regulatory techniques. The book argues that some of the remedies set out in statute or at common law for working people are a poor 'fit' for the employment rights they are supposed to protect. Employment rights are often undervalued in the legal system, because remedies for their infringement are subject to limitations not applicable to rights in other settings. This limits their ability both to uphold the dignity of working people and to deter breaches. Moreover, the remedies on offer do not always suggest a sensible ranking of employment rights in which fundamental rights attract stronger remedies than other kinds of rights and interests. The book suggests why some of these problems might have arisen and makes proposals for reform. It also considers the wider implications for a system of employment law that depends so heavily for its enforcement on working people litigating to enforce their rights. Ranging widely across theory and doctrine, and analysing criminal law, contract and tort as well as statutory employment law, this book will be of interest to academics and researchers seeking a deeper understanding of the subject. This landmark book unveils the history of defending Australia's natural environment and examines the subject's legal and political contexts from the birth of the nation in 1901 until the advent of the so-called modern era of environmental regulation in the late 1960s. It rejects the mythology that Australia lacked environmental law before the late 1960s in revealing how many of today's environmental laws, from pollution control to nature conservation, emerged from precedents or events much earlier in the 20th century. This history however reveals a discrepancy between lawmakers' greater efficacy to exploit rather than protect the environment, a discrepancy that grew as nature's backlash intensified in a rapidly degrading continent colonised to build the Australian nation. In exploring these dynamics, the book offers a rich tapestry of case studies illustrated with historic photographs that show the origins of Australia's environmental laws and how they borrowed from international precedents or furnished lessons for other nations. Through its multi-disciplinary enquiry, the book offers scholars and students of environmental law, legal history and the environmental humanities a unique story about the failures and successes in the making of environmental law.