Dear friends and colleagues,

It is a great honour and pleasure for me to present Professor emerita Ann Numhauser-Henning from the Faculty of Law at Lund University in Sweden with the Bob Hepple Award for Lifetime Achievement in Labour Law.

She is a friend and mentor, and we have collaborated closely for many years.

Ann Numhauser-Henning’s research interests are impressively broad, and throughout her career she has in fruitful and innovative ways explored links between labour law, non-discrimination law, social welfare law, and more recently, elder law. She adopts a socio-legal approach, and analyses the function of law in relation to labour market and societal developments.

She has a talent for ‘spotting’ new important labour market trends, and critically analyzing them from a labour law perspective.

This was the case with the increase in atypical employment and flexibilisation of work in the early 1980s, which she studied in her doctoral thesis on fixed-term work, presented in 1984.

This was also the case with the growing importance and expansion of non-discrimination law in Europe in the mid-1990s and onwards.

And, more recently, this was the case with the challenges of population ageing and the importance of elder law, and intergenerational perspectives.

Ann Numhauser-Henning’s scholarly career is characterized by international collaboration and comparative perspectives. She has engaged in legal-scientific discourses at Nordic, European and global levels, and published in Swedish, English and Spanish.

I believe that one of her very first encounters with the global labour law community took place at the World Congress of the International Society of Labour and Social Security Law in Caracas in Venezuela in 1985. Here she made a noteworthy intervention in Spanish in a plenary session, highlighting comparative aspects on atypical employment.
Ann Numhauser-Henning has collaborated with colleagues in Europe and all over the world – not least with colleagues in Chile. She has conducted research on Chilean and South American labour law, and been a regular visitor, both teaching and researching.

Ann Numhauser-Henning is a scholarly leader and innovator – one might even venture to say entrepreneur.

She has initiated new and innovative research projects – such as the Norma Research Programme on normative developments within the law of the social dimension, including elder law perspectives, which celebrated its twentieth anniversary a couple of years ago.

She brings people together – scholars from different countries, and scholars at different stages of their academic career. These long-lasting scholarly and personal friendships were reflected in the Festschrift that she received two years ago, with contributions from almost 70 persons, from some 20 different countries, from all over the world.

Ann Numhauser-Henning has served as an important mentor and role-model to younger colleagues. She is a pioneer in the field of gender equality. Not only is she an outstanding scholar in the field of non-discrimination law, but she has also promoted gender equality in academia and society at large in practical and effective ways – as a research group coordinator, at faculty and university levels, for example, as the Pro-Vice-Chancellor of Lund University, and as an expert to governments and the European Commission.

It is a tremendous joy for us to present Ann Numhauser-Henning with this award, and we extend our warmest congratulations.

Mia Rönnmar
Lund University

23 June 2019