Bill Wedderburn, Baron Wedderburn of Charlton
Kenneth William " Bill" Wedderburn, Baron Wedderburn of Charlton QC ( born April 13, 1927 in Deptford; † 9 March 2012) was a British lawyer, university lecturer and Labour Party politician, who with his 1965 published textbook The Worker and the Law became a pioneer in the field of labor law in the UK.
Life
Study and a professor at the LSE
After attending the Haberdashers ' Aske 's Boys ' School in New Cross and the Whitgift School in South Croydon Wedderburn received a scholarship to study law at Queens ' College, University of Cambridge and graduated in 1949 with a Bachelor of Laws ( LL.B. ) with distinction.
After he had served his military service in the Royal Air Force 1949-1951, he was a Fellow at Clare College, University of Cambridge, where he introduced basic principles of labor law in the context of the then only taught business law. In 1953 he was appointed by the Bar of the Middle Temple lawyer.
After Otto Kahn-Freund in 1964 was appointed professor of comparative law at the University of Oxford, Wedderburn was his successor as professor at the London School of Economics and Political Science, and founded there a prominent school for Labour with a number of outstanding students.
Besides his teaching, justified in particular its large number of books, articles and essays of his long-standing reputation.
He has already published his first textbook in the field of labor law, The Worker and the Law ( 1965), a standard work, which appeared several times in the following 25 years in sold-out editions. In the first edition, the focus was in the field of early British labor law, which in 1906 introduced, for example, by the Trade Disputes Act, the immunity of trade unions regarding liability for damage caused by strikes. Later editions were concerned, however, with the further developments that created by the United Kingdom's accession to the European Communities.
Union consultant and member of the House of Lords
In 1971 he started as a consultant to the Trades Union Congress (TUC ), the umbrella organization of British trade unions, against the 1971, introduced by the Government of the Conservative Party Law on Industrial Relations (Industrial Relations Bill), and received a standing ovation after a speech to officials of trade unions at the Royal Albert Hall.
After the Labour Party was able to again ask the prime minister after the victory in the general election on 28 February 1974, Harold Wilson, was Wedderburn author of the Trade Union and Labour Relations Act 1974, which was intended to replace the law of the Tory government. He then became Chairman of the Independent Audit Committee of the TUC and was a member of that after the chairman Alan Bullock Bullock Commission on employee participation.
In 1977, he was raised as a life peer with the title of Baron Wedderburn of Charlton in the peerage, and was henceforth a member of the House of Lords, the upper house of the British Parliament.
In the following years he published a series of comparative studies, such as Labour Law and the Community (1983) and Employment Rights in Britain and Europe ( 1991). In addition, he organized and attended numerous international conferences Scientific, which made him a leading expert of the European labor law. Wedderburn, who was also involved in contract law, tort law and commercial law, was for 17 years editor of the journal Modern Law Review.
Baron Wedderburn, who worked as a lawyer to continue and was appointed Queen's Counsel in 1990, taught at the London School of Economics and Political Science until he retired in 1992.
While the government of Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, he voted against all eight directed against the trade unions laws, which was discussed in the House of Lords. At that time he belonged predominantly to the Labour leadership, the Front Bench, in the upper house and delivered, in particular, with Viscount Hailsham, the Lord Chancellor of the Thatcher government, fierce battles of words.
In 1989 he was one of the founders of the Institute of Employment Rights ( Institute of Employment Rights ), a think tank supported by the trade unions for workers' rights, and was its president until 1995. In this position, he hoped that the Institute would affect the legislative future Labour governments. So he committed some years before the start of New Labour in 1997, what he expected in the reforms of the trade union law.