Affiliated Lecturer in Law, Admissions Tutor and Fellow in Law
Interests
Zoe is best-known for her work on Law and Marxism, and for developing radical or critical approaches to the study of the law’s relationship with capitalism. Zoe applies a Marxian inspired lens to study a range of legal topics, but much of her work focuses on labour law and questions of political strategy. The issues she explores include the relationship between law and capitalism, and the role of legal concepts in shaping the latter’s develop; questions of legal form, and their relationship with political strategy; the relationship between law, gender, and race; and, more generally, the role of law in the perpetuation, and legitimisation, of inequality. A lot of her work focuses on UK labour law history, with particular emphasis on the history of wage and working time development; the history of industrial relations and legal frameworks governing trade unions and industrial action; and the law’s role in shaping the so-called ‘future of work’.
Research centres and interest groups
CV / Biography
Zoe Adams is Fellow and Admissions Tutor at King's College Cambridge, and an Affiliated Lecturer in Law at the University of Cambridge, UK. She has a BA from Pembroke College, Cambridge, an LLM from the European University Institute in Florence, and a PhD from Pembroke College Cambridge. She lectures Labour law, Advanced Labour law, and Economics of Law and Regulation. She supervises Labour Law and Tort Law for undergraduates, and is also principal supervisor for a number of PhD students. Zoe is an examiner for the LLM Advanced Labour law course and is also an External Examiner for two courses at the University of Glasgow (undergraduate and LLM).
Zoe was awarded the Yorke Prize for her PhD thesis, A Social Ontology of the Wage, and her first book, Labour and the Wage: A Critical Perspective, was published by Oxford University Press in 2020. Zoe’s second monograph, The Legal Concept of Work was published in November 2022. She is now in the planning stages of a third book, exploring the relationship between law and power. In addition to this, she is co-author of two textbooks, one on Tort Law, published by Oxford University press, and one on Labour Law, published by Hart; each of which are core practitioners’ texts in their respective fields. Beyond this, Zoe has published a vast number of articles in a range of peer-reviewed journals, including the Industrial Law Journal, the Cambridge Law Journal, the Journal of Law and Political Economy, Historical Materialism (Forthcoming), Cambridge Journal of Economics, and the European Law Journal. She is an Editor for the Cambridge Journal of Economics. She also regularly contributes book reviews and case notes, and is also regularly consulted as a reviewer for the above noted journals, as well as for academic publishers such as Hart and Cambridge University Press.

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