Introduction of Professor Alain Supiot
Recipient of the Bob Hepple Award in Labour Law 2025
Labour Law Research Network Conference, 2025: Bangkok, Thailand
A very good evening to all:
My name is Supriya Routh and I am a labour law scholar working at the University of British Columbia in Canada. I am here to introduce Professor Alain Supiot, one of the recipients of the Bob Hepple Award in Labour Law this year. And I promise to all my friends with whom I am going out for dinner tonight that I will not brag for a moment that I happen to closely know both of the Bob Hepple Award recipients this year, and that I have dined and wined with the both!
I am delighted to be able to present Professor Alain Supiot, the lawyer, the thinker, and one of the most imaginative interdisciplinary intellectual, to you. While it is a cliché to say that he needs no introduction, it is indeed true that to this crowd Professor Supiot does not need an introduction. Yet, continuing the legacy of our profession, I will venture to introduce Professor Supiot on this fantastic occasion.
Professor Supiot is a Professor Emeritus at the Collège de France, where he held the chair of “Social State and Globalization: Legal Analysis of Solidarities” from 2012 to 2019. He was also elected as the Fellow of the British Academy in 2015 and is a corresponding member of the British Academy. Professor Supiot’s academic career started at the University of Bordeaux in 1979, where he earned his Doctorate. Since then, he has been recognized by several honorary doctorate degrees from the universities of Louvain-la-Neuve, Aristotle of Thessaloniki, Liège, and Buenos Aires.
Professor Alain Supiot was born in Nantes, France and grew up between the banks of the river Loire and beaches of the Atlantic. He was the first lawyer in his extended family that has had some experience in carpentry, sailing, and teaching, but none in the art of lawyering, which is where he decided to trailblaze. Following his hometown’s motto – Neptune favours those who leave – he left Nantes, first, travelling across the United States and then working abroad in various cities. While he studied sociology, linguistic, and philosophy, it is the idea of “justice” that triggered his lifelong interest in law. As he sees it, “law, as the site of formal rigour on the one hand and complexity and instability of human affairs on the other,” generated his interest in Labour Law. That interest took him to the University of Bordeaux for his doctoral studies, which he defended on 29 June in 1979 – 46 years to the date!
After earning his doctorate, Professor Supiot worked as a professor at the Universities of Poitiers and Nantes, and as a member of the Institut Universitaire de France (2001-2012), before being elected to the Collège de France. He spent several years as a visiting scholar, including at the Institute of Industrial Relations Berkeley (in 1981); the European University Institute Florence (1989-90); and the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin (1997-98). From 1998 to 2001 he chaired the National Council for the Development of the Humanities and Social Sciences and from 2017 to 2019 he was a member of the Global Commission on the Future of Work at the International Labour Organization. In 1995, Professor Supiot founded the Maison des Sciences de l’Homme Ange Guépin, which promotes an interdisciplinary approach to the transformations of social ties. And in 2008, he founded – and directed until 2013 – the Nantes Institute for Advanced Study.
Professor Supiot’s work is deeply interdisciplinary in nature, and has primarily been in the areas of labour law, social security, dogmatic basis of social relationships, and legal theory. He has authored, co-authored, and edited and co-edited 32 books. Many of these books are translated into a range of different languages. In these works, Professor Supiot prominently questions the continued relevance of labour law based on the imagination of employment relationship of the industrial age for improving the well-being of workers engaged in heterogeneous kinds of livelihood activities. In following his lead, legal scholars all across the globe continue to generate an expansive body of truly innovative work on this agenda. This research agenda has launched numerous academic careers, including my own. His understanding of the worker as a lifelong status, instead of private contractual exchanges, has been influential not only in legal scholarship but also in the social sciences.
His ideas articulate a grand vision of labour law – or the Law of Work – scholarship as the core of a “cultural fact” that requires broad interdisciplinary thinking, rather than a normative technique, offering commentaries on legal doctrines. By emphasizing the foundational questions of “what is work in the human experience?” and “what is the relationship between justice and law?”, he expands the role of labour lawyers from what has been historically assigned to them. Labour law, according to Professor Supiot, is a foundational constitutive endeavour of a society. This grand vision of what it means to be a labour lawyer is simultaneously inspiring and intimidating. He trailblazed so that others could overcome the intimidation and follow him in this exciting endeavour of figuring out what it means to ponder regulation of human livelihood.
His work on the Anthropology of law, wherein law – like language – is understood in its social, cultural, and historical contexts, offers a magisterial treatise of law, moving far beyond the narrow positivistic and institutionalist imagination of law that has often remained oblivious to history and politics in the framing of the idea of law. And his work on – what he calls in his native French language – “mondialization” challenges the West-led globalization as the standardization of the market place denying heterogeneous civilizations to chart their own destinies. In his intellectual resolve to employ normative standards to make the world more just, his emphasis has been on “the social” as a frame of reference and responsibility as the basis of socio-economic cooperation. It is, thus, unsurprising that Professor Supiot’s work continues to inspire generations of scholars – philosophers and lawyers included.
What this gathering may not be so deeply aware is that Professor Supiot is also a connoisseur of cinema, and often cherishes its impact on popular imagination. He has reflected on the role of cinema as a visual medium in the popular imagination of work and the law to regulate such work.[1] He showed how, as a medium for people to tell their aesthetic and cultural history, cinema has gradually articulated humans as machines, contractualization of work, the idea of servitude, and globalization and financialization of the world economy in a way that is immediately understood by a large section of the population – a reach that scholars of law of work often do not have. He is incredibly passionate about the role of cinema in resisting American cultural imperialism and sustaining divergent identities. He has particular praise for Bollywood for resisting American imperialism.
In spite of his outsized contribution to the legal, and in particular, labour law community, his regret remains that, as the sole legal scholar in the International Labour Organization’s Global Commission on the Future of Work, purporting to shape the path of the ILO in this century and beyond, he failed to have any “bold legal proposal” included in the Commission’s Report even when many other members of the Commission were supportive of such ideas. This regret is, perhaps, something for the ILO to continue to ponder for its future.
I got to know Professor Supiot closely at the Institute of Advanced Study in Nantes, which he had established in 2008 in order to facilitate interdisciplinary scholarly dialogue among scholars from the Global South and North. He conceived the Institute in the broadest intellectual sense possible, as a venue for unstructured, imaginative, and ambitious dialogue between different disciplines including natural sciences, social sciences, and law. Under his guidance, the Institute has been a staunch supporter and patron for centralizing non-Eurocentric worldviews. In fact, he personally knows more about Indian and Chinese mythologies, history, constitution, and culture than many native scholars from these regions, including me. At the Institute of Advanced Studies in Nantes, there’s a prominently displayed World Atlas, where Australia appears on top and Greenland¾a subject of much recent conversation¾appears at the bottom. Most people say that the map is “Upside Down” – Professor Supiot will say, it’s an insurgent ontology, an ontology that might help us figure out the essence of “mondialization” as opposed to “globalization” as standardization of the market.
It is at the Institute of Advance Study that I saw his cheerleading for younger scholars and his enthusiasm for whatever these scholars might be saying. He throws his weight 100% behind younger and lesser-known scholars, often promoting them to halls of power and towers of ivory. Most recently, he told me that my reflections in my new book are similar to those offered by Montesquieu. Well, no one has ever accused me of modesty; but hearing his endorsement, even I started blushing quite instantaneously!
While Professor Alain Supiot is not fond of awards unless it grants him the ability to work in complete freedom or is endowed by “Republic of Letters”, that is, scholarly peers, it is our honour that Professor Alain Supiot has agreed to become a Bob Hepple awardee. Professor Supiot, I thank you for the intellectual expanse that you have endowed us with. Your life and intellectual legacy are inspirations for us and numerous other scholars across the globe. You are a truly deserving recipient of the Bob Hepple Award in Labour Law.
Dear friends and colleagues, please join me in welcoming Professor Alain Supiot.
[1] Alain Supiot, “Preface” in Le Travail, Entre Droit et Cinema (Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2012).