Dr Zoe Adams

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.

Zoe graduated 5th in her year with a First Class degree in Law from Pembroke College, Cambridge in 2013. She started work for the CBR that summer. She has since been working alongside Simon Deakin on a number of projects including research on labour law in developing countries funded by the DFID/ESRC Joint Fund for Poverty Alleviation. She has been involved in creating a dataset that measures the legal content of labour laws in over 80 countries. She has since co-authored a number of articles on labour law, european union law, and legal methodology. Her research focuses on the interaction of politics, law and public policy, with particular reference to labour law and EU law. She completed her solicitors' Legal Practice Course in June 2014 and was awarded an LLM from the EUI, Florence, in September 2014. She has been studying for her PHD at Pembroke College, Cambridge since October 2015. Her current work examines the relationship between labour law and capitalism using a social ontologic method. She has been supervising labour law at Cambridge since January 2016. She has been an affiliated lecturer with the Cambridge Law Faculty since 2017, lecturing labour law and economics of law and regulation (LLM). She also supervises tort law.