So I think the probably should make a start,

laughing everyone, I'm Enne Leslo.

And it's my huge pleasure to introduce our speaker, Jeremiah's Parasal.

Jeremiah is a fellow at Maudling at the University of Oxford,

and his principal research interests lie in employment and corporate EU law.

He has kindly, I think, brought along some flyers in front of the room, so he's recently published a really interesting edited collection with Mark Friedman looking at the impact of the Court of

Justice's decisions in Viking and Laval. But he's not going to talk to us about that today. He's

talking to us about freedom of contracts in EU law. He's going to talk for about 40 minutes

and he's kindly agreed to take questions afterwards. Over to you.

Thank you, Amy, and thank you very much indeed to the centre for the invitation.

It's a pleasure to talk here today because the last time I was in Cambridge, which was actually to talk about Viking and Laval, when we were thinking about Monti too. In a sense, I'm back

talking about EU labour law, but I'm back to talk with something that's potentially much

worse, and that could make Viking and Laval look like it was just a brief walk in the park.

What I want to talk about is Article 16 of the Charter of Fundamental Rights and how the

Court of Justice has very recently used it to embrace a particularly aggressive notion of

freedom of contract as a fundamental right in EU law.

So in terms of what I hope to do in the next half hour, 40 minutes or so. First of all, I want to

briefly talk about why I think that this actually matters. You could say that it's just a

random, a barren case, but I think it's quite important both for labour liars, but also for

EU liars more generally. And then I want us to look at the different ways in which freedom of

contract crops up in EU law.

First, as a general principle, the arguable is quite a weak and quite a confused one.

...