This book analyzes remote work through a holistic approach. The combination of advancing technologies and transformations in the thinking about work location has interacted to provide the axes defining remote work and its treatment by regulatory systems. The upsurge of work at home and other versions of remote work has transformed the traditional basis for the operation of labor institutions not only as a direct result of this form of employment – and its regulatory challenges – but also because of more indirect ways in which the complete employment system has been transformed due to the influence of home-based work regulation. I argue that the impact and interactions of employment forms as viewed in a holistic approach offer a more accurate understanding than would the effort to examine remote work in some sort of analytical isolation from other conditioning and interacting factors. The fruitfulness of a holistic approach is tied to the fact that types of work and regulatory instruments initially designed for a specific type of work or work situation interact with one another in complex ways. I suggest that those interactions can fortify protections for workers by linking different rationales and logics of protection in an encompassing set of regulatory arrangements.

The configurational thinking of methodologist Charles RaginFootnote ¹ provides a very useful framework for carrying out institutional and case study analysis such as the work that we undertake in this volume. Ragin’s work emphasizes the significance of context-based combinations and configurations of causal factors and dynamics. In this perspective, causally relevant conditions or dynamics are really interactions and intersections of forces and events that constitute “configurations” that should be understood holistically. Ragin rejects the view that the causal impact of a given factor can be understood in isolation from its context and the other factors with which it interacts there. CasesFootnote ², in this perspective, should be examined behaviorally through an analytical focus on “casing” that involves both practical and theoretical efforts to identify and understand the patterns of interaction that shape outcomes of interest. This approach is valuable for the study of institutions and their transformations – including the regulation of types of labor. The important work of Kathleen Thelen on institutional evolution and her theoretical elaboration with James Mahoney develop this theme, arguing that the interactions between features of political context and properties of institutions themselves are important to explain institutional changesFootnote ³. According to ThelenFootnote ⁴ the world around institutions is changing and therefore their survival involves ongoing active adaption to transformations in the political and economic environment in which they are embedded. The insights of this literature as well as arguments on remote work suggest that the regulation of remote work cannot be usefully analyzed as an isolated case of employment relations. Instead, these new relations and the regulation of them involve interactions with other forms of employment and the labor institutions designed to regulate them. The overall set of factors that interact with remote work and its regulation is quite large, encompassing, for example, the regulation of working time, the use of technologies and entrepreneurial powers, the right of privacy, conciliation between life and work, mobility, and channels or systems of union representation. This overall set of interactions is new despite the existence of some earlier efforts to deal with partially related phenomena. For example, the regulation of remote work poses challenges that extend beyond the bounds of the arrangements promoted by the flexicurity model. The new set of technologies and work locations that have proliferated with the growth of home-based work introduces growing complexities for labor institutions, complexities that cannot be fully handled or summarized by earlier regulatory treatments of flexibility. I have argued that the evolution of legal regulation of home-based and remote work can contribute to such ends not only because of how it is handled as a specific matter but instead because of how it interacts with other types of work and their regulation. The overall legal structure of labor regulation provides strong grounds for fortifying the defense of worker rights through such interaction. This book is premised on the significance of analyzing labor regulation interactions between remote and “in presence” work for reading current debates on labor law. In reconstructing the entire frame of regulation of remote employment relations, it is crucial to focus not only on protections for workers based on their location of work but also on protections rooted in other elements of their employment whether they are – for example – part-timers, temporary workers, or members of a group subject to discrimination due to their gender or some other social characteristic.

The first chapter, by volume editor Julia López López, extends and develops the book’s overarching approach. As this chapter underscores, increasing forms of employment that combine remote location and technologies with complex work status conditions have created a constellation of cases characterized by hybridization of forms, sources, and contents of regulation. From this hybridization emerges a complexity not only for remote workers but crucially and more broadly for the complete employment system. The chapter identifies the urgent necessity to frame the debate on vulnerability and on the regulation of remote workers through a methodology centered on institutional labor interactions. Relatedly, this contribution also emphasizes the implications of the interactive and holistic approach for policy-oriented analyses of the protection system, arguing that it is essential to take into account all elements of the definition of the employment relation of remote workers including working hours, the length of contracts, and the effects of such parameters on fundamental rights and labor conditions. The real complexity found in the combination of elements of location and technology has tended to mask other types of complexity in labor institutions present in employment and thus the overall pattern of interactions. These additional forms of complexity and their place in the holistic pattern of hybridization should, in the analysis of this chapter, be specified in order to fully appreciate the vulnerability of these workers in their fundamental rights and so as to fully develop debates on the future of labor law as a democratic institution. The “export” of labor institutions such as the right to digital disconnection from one regulatory terrain to others provides illuminating evidence of the transplanting of institutional provisions from remote work to other forms of employment, thereby offering an example of the interactions that characterize labor regulation today.

Building on its overall approach, this book focuses on ways in which all forms of employment are impacted by interactions between values and principles of labor regulatory systems: Sustainability, cooperation, collective action, and approaches to delimiting work teams in the case of remote work exert a broad impact on employment forms. In this vein, the chapter of Tonia Novitz on “The Sustainability of Remote Work: The Significance of International Institutions” analyzes the ways in which remote work can be regulated to address issues relating to the aspiration of sustainable development recognized by the international community in the United Nations (UN) 2030 Agenda. Different forms of remote work raise distinct issues, which are examined in her contribution with reference to the economic, environmental, and social dimensions of sustainability and the relationship between ‘business and human rights’. Novitz argues that, while it is possible to reconcile various modes of remote work with sustainable development objectives, it should not be assumed that this will inevitably be the case. Rather, there are certain preconditions (or safeguards) which must be imposed on employers and obligations that will need to be placed on governments. Her chapter then proceeds to examine the ways in which international institutions could ensure that such preconditions are met, examining the potential contribution from UN human rights instruments, the International Labour Organization, and due diligence mechanisms to provision of such safeguards. Novitz suggests that the ways in which these institutions interact and enable access for worker voice and contestation will be vital for the longer-term sustainability of remote work.

The models of cooperation in the frame of remote work are analyzed in the chapter on “The Societal Value of Workplace Ties and the Challenge of Remote Work” by Cynthia Estlund. Estlund’s chapter emphasizes how the rise of remote work and work-from-home, accelerated by the COVID-19 pandemic, is reshaping and disrupting the social dimension of work – that is, the incidence of cooperation, sociability, and solidarity (as well as conflict) among co-workers. Most of the research and discourse around the trend toward remote work centers naturally on its impact on firms (especially in terms of productivity) or workers (especially in terms of work–life balance). Her chapter focuses instead on how remote work and work-from-home may affect the social underpinnings of political life outside the workplace. In the analysis of Estlund, the quotidian experience of working together – traditionally, face-to-face, side-by-side, day after day, and often across salient lines of social division – generates weak and strong interpersonal bonds that can strengthen the foundations of a democratic society. The cumulative societal benefits of co-worker interactions are at risk insofar as a shift toward remote work tends to thin out and weaken workplace ties. That is especially likely because those societal benefits do not accrue to either workers or firms; she argues that they are “public goods” and spillover benefits of workplace interactions. Those social benefits may thus be neglected even while the preferences of firms and (some) workers regarding the social dimension of work will shape trends in remote work through labor markets and markets for workplace technology. Her chapter develops that thesis and then reflects briefly on whether and how the conventional institutional arsenal of labor and employment law might be deployed to increase the production of such public goods.

Fotis Vergis in his chapter on “Hybrid Action for a Hybrid World: Collective Freedoms and the Challenges of Digital Work Fragmentation” studies collective labor law institutions under the prism of remote workers and the impact on other forms of employment. This chapter notes that “remote work” and “telework,” which used to be regarded as exceptional subcategories of labor engagement, became the norm for white-collar workers during the pandemic, and currently sit at the heart of modern work practices characterized by spatial fragmentation and supported by web-based technological tools. Recent years have seen the advent of hybrid labor arrangements, in which work is directly or indirectly provided through apps or similar pieces of software and other technological innovations (“information and communications technology”). In the holistic analysis of Vergis, the overarching work digitization phenomenon is, inter alia, defined by increasing delocalization and fragmentation of workplaces, and by the advent of algorithmic management which employs advanced software and AI-driven tools of worker control. “Platform work,” for example, an emblematic instance of this perceived paradigm shift of hybridization, may itself become terminologically obsolete, as a variety of (broadly construed) digital “platforms” define the work experience of more “typical” non-gig workers, whether their services are provided at their employers’ premises or not. The same, arguably, applies to our established understanding of “telework” as work performed outside the employer’s premises. As this chapter points out, even work typically performed on-site includes nowadays elements of delocalization, from virtual meetings to the use of virtual workspaces, and from constant online communication as part of a worker’s daily activities to work that is actually performed online in its entirety.

The chapter of Vergis revisits our understanding of “teleworking” and attempts to examine the appropriateness of existing collective labor law institutions to address the needs and particular conditions of workers engaged in digitized hybrid work, given that such processes and institutional structures had been developed with different work models in mind. It considers that a solution may lie with the extension of the scope and focus of the rights to collective organization and action, and with a reevaluation of their substantive content. With regard to work and workplace fragmentation that comes with work digitization, this chapter seeks solutions in worker empowerment through the redeployment of collective labor rights and institutions. Within that context, Vergis also briefly touches upon illustrative case studies that provide glimpses into possible avenues of traditional and alternative collective action tactics. Where appropriate, the relevant current EU framework is used to contextualize the discussion, particularly given the transnational characteristics that often define digitalized workplaces.

Takashi Araki, in his chapter on “Telework in Japan: A Game Changer for the Employment System and Labor Law Policy,” points to the tendency to reinform teamwork in Japan and beyond. Until the COVID-19 pandemic, a working style in Japan that emphasized teamwork was predominant and telework was not widespread. However, due to the COVID-19 pandemic, a majority of companies had no choice but to introduce telework. Telework, where individual workers operate independently rather than collectively, was – in Araki’s analysis – an entirely new way of working for many Japanese individuals. His chapter argues that to make telework function efficiently, a reevaluation of Japan’s traditional employment system, where job descriptions are not specified in employment contracts and individuals agree only to become members of a company, became necessary. While it was previously considered an obligation for workers to comply with employers’ transfer orders involving relocation, telework has introduced a new option of handling such orders without physically relocating. In this way, Araki suggests that telework has the potential to be a game changer in Japan’s traditional employment system. However, there are diverse legal issues that need to be resolved when introducing telework.

The book also analyzes the debates and institutional interactions regarding several frontiers of labor law, namely subordination, territory, and responsibility. Several chapters examine institutional interactions and debates that lie on the borders of labor law and that are articulated around these themes. As such, these themes are intrinsically linked to labor law but also extend beyond it.

The concept of subordination, as a feature of labor law extending beyond the remote work systems, is analyzed by Adalberto Perulli in his chapter “Remote Working and Subordination.” Remote working – which spread widely during the COVID-19 pandemic – is clearly today one of the main forms of innovation in the world of work. Perulli’s chapter notes that in this case, as always, within innovation phenomena we have static elements, coming from the past, and dynamic elements, looking to the future and to overcoming the status quo. His chapter suggests that, consequently, the evaluation of remote work may be either conservative or innovative. In the first perspective, remote work can be considered as a simple re-proposition of the Fordist-Taylorist enterprise, with some space-time updates which, however, do not actually change the characteristics of employment as a not democratic relationship (involving the worker’s submission to the employer’s managerial, control and disciplinary power, lack of autonomy, personal dependence, etc.).

On the other hand, remote work can be recognized as the symptom of a broader cultural, organizational, and process change in the firm, allowing the worker to conquer new spaces of freedom and autonomy, which not only allows for a new balance in the relationship between work and life (as required, for example, by Directive 2019/1158/EU on work–life balance for parents and carers which refers to “flexible working arrangements” including “the use of remote working”), but also redefines both the factual and juridical connotations of subordination. His chapter analyzes this second perspective and, on the basis of legislation and collective bargaining, tries to define the elements of change in the concept and morphology of subordination within the employment relationship.

The implications of territory for labor law institutions are taken up in Alexandre de le Court’s chapter on “Cross-Border Remote Workers and the Virtual Place of Work: New Pressure on the Territorial Application of Labour Law.” De le Court’s study suggests that the advancement of technology has significantly altered the characteristics of remote work in general, and cross-border remote work in particular. The varied categories of cross-border remote workers, including hybrid remote workers, permanent remote workers, digital nomads, platform workers, and crowd workers, present complex regulatory challenges. These workers, in De le Court’s analysis, possess distinct characteristics and concerns, complicating both descriptive and normative analyses of remote work. Additionally, advances in technology and the growing possibilities for telework have altered the traditional remote work model, where the workers’ physical locations were typically aligned with the countries or regions where their employers sold goods or services. An increasing number of remote workers are now able to provide services across borders, to markets and countries where they or their employers have no physical connection. The greater possibility of this new form of delocalization, alongside outsourcing or opening branches abroad, increases the weight of factors linked with workforce management when companies decide to have recourse to remote work, to the detriment of operational factors. The chapter argues that as there are more employment regulations to choose from, this increases the possibility for the employer to exploit lower labor standards in other countries and avoid responsibilities toward their workers. The greater access to cross-border remote workers also increases the supply of labor with a consequent increase in international competition between workers, which also extends to new types of jobs. Those new challenges to worker protection also intersect with the global debates on social dumping, wherein employers may seek to exploit lower labor standards in other countries while at the same time possibly raising employment prospects and prosperity in those same countries.

De le Court suggests that the new characteristics of cross-border remote work have called into question the existing frameworks for coordinating labor law and social security legislation. For instance, in the European Union, provisional extensions have been granted to rules implemented during the pandemic to accommodate telework without altering the previously applicable social security law. The current framework also causes some companies to deny cross-border remote work for their employees, limiting its function as a tool to increase freedom for employees. Also, several studies have begun to question the effectiveness of these rules in determining the applicable labor law for cross-border remote work situations, as they have not proven to adequately protect workers or prevent social dumping, particularly for some categories of remote workers. One of the main reasons is the traditional interpretation of the concept of the habitual place of work as the place where workers are physically performing their work and its central position as a connecting factor, rooted in the idea that it coincides with the socioeconomic environment in which the workers are embedded and thus where they will enjoy better protection. However, this interpretation, rooted in the principle of territoriality, does not fit well with the new realities of cross-border telework.

De le Court’s analysis of the literature and jurisprudence in different cases shows that new interpretations of the place of work are brought forward with the view to better protect cross-border remote workers, both in Private International Law and in Labor Law, considering the increasingly virtual nature of the workplace. However, the principle of territoriality remains a strong argument in the hands of higher courts to limit evolution in that direction.

The chapter of Choi Sukhwan on “Remote Work and Redistribution of Responsibility: The Korean Case in Perspective” suggests that remote work in Korea, which rapidly accelerated mainly with digitalization and COVID-19, is posing challenging issues about traditional labor law in Korea. The practice of long working hours, the crisis of a low birth rate, and, consequently, an aging population demand fundamental changes of working style. In Choi’s analysis, with the development of information and communication technology, traditional ways of direct command and supervision seem to be reduced, while the discretion of workers expanded. However, these very technologies also make possible more detailed direction by employers – even by the contractors of the employers. The character of the employment contract as a mutual contract presupposes fair distribution of obligation and responsibility. Changing situations surrounding working conditions such as remote work may propose re-distribution of responsibility. This chapter explores the impact of remote work in the perspective of employers’ responsibility by taking into account the experience of Korean regulation and policies.

The interactions and new perspectives on fundamentals rights, technologies, and powers inside firms attract the attention of several contributors. Elias Felten takes up these concerns in his chapter on “Telework and Digital Surveillance: Legal Challenges on the Interface of Labour and Data Protection Law,” a study on the implications of remote work and new technologies on privacy and dignity. Felten notes that the progressive digitalization of industries and services, which accelerated rapidly in the last decade, has direct effects on the organization of labor. Telework is first and foremost a consequence of the generally increased use of information technology in our professional and private lives. The organizational changes of labor due to digitalization, however, challenge the functionality and effectiveness of labor law. Felton argues that the employer’s comprehensible concerns such as the idea that teleworkers might pursue private interests at home serve in practice as a justification for the implementation of significant monitoring measures. Hence, we face a significant paradox: Even though teleworkers enjoy a putative higher degree of autonomy because they are not present at the employers’ premises and therefore not subject to the physical authority of the employer, they are at the same time exposed to a higher degree of dependency since the employers’ authority is diffusing and condensing in digital control measures. Data protection gains therefore gain increasing importance in the labor context. Labor protection in many cases cannot be separated from data protection anymore and vice versa. However, Felten’s chapter argues that this evolution is not sufficiently mirrored by the law. The chapter analyzes in its first part the existing shortcomings and loopholes exemplified by the problem of digital surveillance of telework. In its second part it seeks to identify possible legal mechanisms to create or even foster interaction between labor and data protection law.

The chapter of Miguel Rodrigez-Piñero Royo and Eusebi Colàs-Neila on “Remote Work and Artificial Intelligence: Threat or Chance for Worker’s Rights?” focuses on the technological element – expressed in AI – which is usually part of the definition of remote work. This chapter discusses how AI tools shape the organization and performance of remote work, how algorithms impact on remote workers’ rights, and how trade unions and workers can harness these powerful instruments to improve working and living conditions.

Three hypotheses are considered. First, it is argued that AI systems and algorithmic management, the use and purpose of which is decided by the employer, induce a de facto deepening of the subordinate position of the worker. If we also consider the alteration of the classic locational element, and some effects of isolation eroding collective bonds with other workmates, a possible consequence may be making remote workers more vulnerable to the degradation of their labor and fundamental rights. Second, the chapter argues against technological determinism. The neutrality and objectivity that may seem intrinsic to digital technology are, in the perspective of Rodríguez-Piñero and Colàs-Neila, not genuine, and this is particularly predictable of AI: The parameters of digital technologies are given to them by human beings or institutions. In the analysis of this chapter, AI reproduces and amplifies hierarchies and situations of discrimination. However, a reversibility of their use, favoring workers and their representatives, is also possible. The invisibility and fragmentation of remote workers might be overcome with the use of digital mechanisms, which are also essential for the development of trade union organizing and protest activities. And finally, technological resources usually are more present in remote work than in traditional work provided at the workplace. There are, a priori, no particularities, beyond the fact that the alteration of the workspace entails a business decision to use AI systems or algorithms for its management or favors the use of applications specially designed for this type of performance.

This chapter is divided into four main sections. The first section contextualizes the use of AI in the employment relationship in a diachronic perspective, pointing out the convergences and divergences with previous technologies, to better understand the legal challenges posed by AI. The second section offers an approach to the concept of AI, pointing out some applications commonly used in remote work, to comprehend how it works and its consequences for workers’ rights. This technical approach is needed to develop a proper risk assessment of AI in remote work, especially (but not only) regarding the right to equality and non-discrimination. The third section analyzes the complex multi-level regulatory framework applicable, which includes both heteronomous and autonomous labor standards, common to all workers and specific to remote working. This involves intersections with other fields of law in which digital technology is central such as data protection (i.e., GDPR), and emerging regulations of platform work (such as the European Commission’s proposal of Directive) and AI (i.e., the EU’s AI Act); and constitutional rules recognizing fundamental rights that can be exercised by workers in the employment relationship. In the light of this regulatory package, the following issues are reviewed by these authors: how the introduction and application of AI tools in remote work should take place; which tools can be used, and which cannot; who controls such use and how; what role workers’ representatives may/should have; and which accountability mechanisms of the employer and/or the AI provider can be activated. The last section provides examples of how AI can improve the working conditions of remote workers and be used for their organization and representation by trade unions.

The final debates in the book are about rights as goals of labor law. This theme is prominent in the treatment of equality and non-discrimination in the chapter on “Telework and Work–Life Balance: Best Practices Addressing Gender Inequalities” where the author, Nuria Pumar, points out that telework presents two quite distinct faces as regards working time. In her perspective, in general the statistics associate remote work with the intensification of work and with longer, more irregular work schedules; yet, at the same time – and this particular characteristic is directly influenced by European regulations and the EU Framework Agreement on Telework – telework can constitute a working-time arrangement that facilitates a better reconciliation of work and family life, provided it is promoted in favor of workers’ interests. Yet, when seeking to determine whether teleworking has a positive or negative impact on the work–life balance, the outcomes are clearly ambivalent, in Pumar’s analysis. Indeed, the extant literature examining the implications of teleworking for gender equality provides a rather unsurprising conclusion, but one that should be kept very much in mind, and that is that teleworking in itself is no guarantee of co-responsibility or of the transformation of gender roles. On the contrary, due to the very nature of teleworking, but at the same time owing to business practices and prevailing social stereotypes, there is a risk that it may be perceived as the most “appropriate” working arrangement for women, in a way that perpetuates gender roles and, even, widens the labor gap. To address this danger, Pumar argues that socioeconomic and cultural alliances, policies, and regulations must all row in the same direction and, in their wake, take steps to eliminate all patriarchal structures and systemic discrimination.

Remote work is not a gender-neutral form of work because it brings paid work into the domestic sphere, a traditionally feminine domain where productive and reproductive spaces overlap. Developing that idea, Pumar’s chapter analyzes the impact that labor legislation and business practices of so-called “indecent” working time have on women and explores the issues to which teleworking gives rise in relation to working time and the work–life balance. Additionally, and with the focus more firmly on business practices, the chapter addresses the opportunities afforded by telework as a working-time arrangement and the possible penalties that women teleworkers may have to face. In this sense, the negotiation of hybrid and reversible teleworking formulas facilitates, on the one hand, the visibility of teleworkers and, at the same time, their capacity to request to either work remotely or return to face-to-face work, considering their personal needs and their different life cycles.

However, Pumar suggests that, as with other measures of workplace conciliation, certain business practices and associated stereotypes can lead to teleworking becoming seen as the “mommy track,” chosen above all by women, so that it becomes another manifestation of the so-called “flexibility stigma,” linked to the exercise of motherhood and childcare.

In an effort at preventing or reversing such inequalities, the chapter undertakes an assessment of the guarantees and protections provided by the European regulatory framework and of best practices in European transnational collective bargaining, where the lynchpins of these guarantees are the principles of voluntariness and non-discrimination, as well as respect for fundamental rights. Pumar concludes that the implementation of teleworking, as a mode that is respectful of decent work and of a worker’s fundamental rights, needs to be firmly anchored in regulatory and institutional frameworks and in collective bargaining, in ways that seek to promote equality and diversity in firms in a transversal and transparent fashion and in adherence with the principle of co-responsibility.

The last chapter on goals and challenges of remote work and other forms of employment is the study of José Luis Goñi Sein, Beatriz Rodríguez Sanz de Galdeano, Julen Llorens Espada, and & Uxue Del Río Ilincheta offering “An International Perspective on Occupational Health and Safety Challenges for Remote Workers.” Their chapter examines the main challenges posed by remote working from the perspective of occupational health and safety protection. In their analysis, understanding the paradigm shift presented by this new way of rendering services requires a multilevel approach. This entails, first, an analysis of the applicable legislation on health and safety at work, and possible initiatives to ensure minimum standards of protection regardless of where the remote work is provided. In this regard, their chapter proposes a revision of the rules of conflict for the determination of the applicable law, as well as the need to work toward a specific homogenization of EU legislation on preventive obligations for remote work. Second, they argue that it is necessary to analyze how the fact that these workers can provide services anywhere and at any time affects health and safety at work and its regulations. To that end, the chapter analyzes the problem of applying the current concepts of effective working time and rest time to the new activity times that arise in remote work, reconsidering new interpretative tasks in accordance with the digital environment. These authors also examine the problems that arise in controlling working time and its recording in remote work, as well as the legal limits of the new forms of control used by companies to verify remote work activity. Their chapter argues for the need to articulate specific forms of digital disconnection in order to guarantee the correct protection of occupational health and co-responsibility at work, as well as the need to introduce online working time as a psychosocial risk factor in the workplace.

Finally, this study examines the implications of remote work for the management of occupational risk prevention, taking as a distorting element the fact that the worker no longer provides services in a workplace that is directly controlled and accessed by the company and externally administered prevention services. The authors focus on how occupational risk prevention planning is carried out, paying special attention to the new occupational risks that may appear in the digital sphere, such as cyber-bullying. They also take up the increase in more traditional psychosocial risks, and the difficulties that arise in achieving an effective assessment of these risks.

Through all these contributions and the volume’s overarching framework, this book offers a new perspective on remote work systems and consequences, analyzing the interactions of labor law institutions holistically. Our work illuminates the transformations that this form of work has brought about and their implications for a complete understanding of increasingly complex employment systems. This contribution sheds light on numerous crucial debates including those that examine vulnerabilities, sustainability, cooperation, hybridization, subordination, territories, responsibility, new technologies, privacy, dignity, equality and non-discrimination and health and safety. Our holistic approach to remote work and its interactions serves to deepen our understanding of essentially the full range of themes addressed by scholars of work and labor both in law and in related disciplines.