Document Type

Article

Publication Title

Case Western Reserve Journal of International Law

Abstract

My task on this occasion is to talk about law reform in New Zealand, which invites you, the audience, to ask what a nice boy from Brooklyn knows about this subject. But in fact there is a close synergy between my previous work and the topic at hand. During the 1980s I wrote two controversial articles (and one rejoinder) on labor and employment law. Partly in consequence of my free-market message, in 1990, 1995, and 1999, I traveled to New Zealand at the behest of the New Zealand Business Round Table to speak about these subjects among others. I was their foreign carpetbagger, as it were, who was asked to bring his own perspective - a libertarian, philosophical outlook informed by a consequentialist, intellectual orientation - to bear on the problems of the day. I addressed many topics on those visits, for there were many areas of economic policy that were highly contested at the time. But one recurrent theme on all three visits was the state of New Zealand employment law. My purpose was to persuade New Zealanders, and the people in charge of New Zealand's political institutions, to engage in what the 19t" Century lawyers used to call "liberalization" of their labor laws, that is, that the classical regime of freedom of contract should govern employment relations. That project rested on the explicit assumption that New Zealand should remove most, if not all, the regulations and collective bargaining from its current law.

First Page

361

Volume

33

Publication Date

2001

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