Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. It's very nice to welcome you all here. I have great pleasure in introducing to you Professor and Davis, who is margues. She marks in many ways. She is a form of many terms because she writes on labour law, European law and public law.

And her strength lies in the beautiful character with which she writes and the fact that she is able to bring ideas from the different disciplines and pull them together.

So it's a great privilege for us to have her here.

And without further I do, I'll give the floor to Anne. Thank you. Thank you very much, all of you for coming. I know it's getting towards the end of term and everyone is exhausted. Thank you for that kind introduction to which I fear I may not live up. But anyway, here we go. So what I want to do today is talk about the Court of Justice,

and I want to talk about its decisions in labour law cases.

From the perspective of the literature on labour courts.

So let me give you a little bit of background to start with and then I'll

explain why I think this is a useful framework for analysis. I should say that because I've got

roughly half an hour to talk in, this may end up sounding like a rather more blunt and

aggressive paper than it actually is in its full written version, because just

in order to get through in the time, I probably won't be able to get quite all the caveats

and qualifications in that exist in the main paper. So please do bear that in mind.

So many countries choose to resolve labour disputes by entrusting them to specialist labour courts.

Of course, for those of you who know the UK, we have a system of employment tribunals

which deal with individual employment disputes between a worker and his or her employer.

Other countries use them for collective labour disputes,

so to resolve disagreements about the interpretation of a collective agreement,

for example, the Norwegian Labour Court is a good example of that.

And there are some countries in which labour courts decide both types of dispute.

So why is it that people think that there's a need to entrust labour law cases to specialist courts?

Well, there's an interesting paper by McCarthy in which he identifies four justifications for this.

Firstly, the informality of proceedings or the possibility of having informal proceedings. This is

...