Zoe's academic interests lie primarily in the realm of labour law, tort law, legal methodology, social ontology, and law and economics. Zoe describes herself as a ‘critical’ legal scholar, embedding her work in a structural analysis of law’s relationship with capitalism. The issues she explores include the relationship between law and capitalism, and the role of legal concepts in shaping the latter’s development; 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 within the framework of capitalist societies. 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’. 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. It won the Yorke Prize, in 2020, and has since been shortlisted for both the SLSA Early Career Academic Book Prize, and the SLSA Hart Book Prize. 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.
