Amir Paz-Fuchs (DPhil, University of Oxford) is Professor of Law and Social Justice at the University of Sussex, where he teaches employment law and serves as the Founding Director of Sussex Clinical Legal Education.

Amir’s teaching and research interests focus on areas of labour law, legal theory, public law and human rights, and he has published widely in these areas, including the monograph Welfare to Work (OUP, 2008). He is currently under contract with Oxford University Press to publish a monograph on state-imposed unfree labour and a textbook on clinical legal education.

Under the aegis of the Foundation for Law, Justice and Society at the University of Oxford, Amir led the research programme The Social Contract Revisited: The Modern Welfare State, for which he organised a series of international, multi-disciplinary
workshops and drafted the resulting policy briefs which were distributed
to policy makers and members of Parliament.

In other, related activities, Amir led a five-year, multi-disciplinary project on privatisation and the role of the state, hosted by the Van Leer Institute in Jerusalem. He has also provided consultancy to Israeli Members of Parliament concerning social and economic rights, outsourcing and workers’ rights. He has served on the board of a number of human rights and social justice NGOs, providing consultancy on legal matters and policy issues concerning agency work.

Research

Amir’s research interests and publications on the interaction between law, the political realm and economic structures and institutions, with particular regard to the world of work. Current research interests include:

State-imposed unfree labour: advancing the claim that the work of prison workers, participants in workfare schemes and interns is ‘unfree’, reflecting on their legal position and assessing the role of private corporations that profit from this labour through state regulation.

Modern slavery: identifying the parameters and characteristics of work that should be normatively and legally understood as modern slavery.

Legal regulation of agency work: assessing the legal conceptualisation and rationalisation that relates to the regulation of agency work, and the consequent status and rights of agency workers.