Th e chapters in this volume were fi rst presented at a conference entitled Oxford Labour Law: Past, Present, Future held at St John’s College, Oxford, in July 2012. Th e conference was held to mark the retirement from formal teaching duties of Professor Mark Freedland, and the contributors to this volume are his former colleagues or students (or both). In the course of the conference, we also had occasion to acknowledge the remarkable partnership of Paul Davies and Mark Freedland over four decades, and its enduring imprint both on Oxford labour law and the discipline itself. We are grateful to the many other friends and colleagues who attended the conference and contributed to two days of lively and good-humoured discussion, and particularly to those who chaired sessions (Catherine Barnard, John Bowers QC, Simon Deakin, Sir Patrick Elias and Sir John Mummery). We acknowledge the generous fi nancial support of Oxford University’s John Fell Fund, the Oxford Law Faculty and St John’s College for the conference, the encouragement of the Dean of the Oxford Law Faculty, Professor Timothy Endicott, and the practical help of Marianne Bièse and the staff at St John’s. In preparing the volume for publication we have benefi ted from research assistance from Joelle Grogan, Ioannis Katsaroumpas and Paolo Ronchi, and we would like to thank Richard Hart, Rachel Turner and colleagues at Hart Publishing for their enthusiastic support for this project from the outset. Although this project began as an examination of the contribution of Oxford colleagues to the academic study of labour law, we hope it has a much broader story to tell about the normative, institutional and substantive autonomy of labour law as a discipline, a story we develop in the Introduction. At the same time, we hope that the volume is a fi tting tribute to the inspiration the contributors have derived from their connection, at diff erent times and in diff erent ways, with labour law at Oxford. In this vein, we would like to record our particular gratitude to Paul and Mark.