Gonville & Caius College Fellow Dr Fotis Vergis has been awarded the Yorke Prize by the Faculty of Law at the University of Cambridge.
The award was endowed in 1873 by Edmund Yorke and is offered annually by the Faculty of Law, nominally for an essay on a legal subject that is not less than 30,000 words nor more than 100,000 words in length, and typically for doctoral theses. The prize is awarded “in recognition of the exceptional quality of (a) PhD thesis which makes a substantial contribution to its field of legal knowledge”.
Fotis’ dissertation, 'Collective Labour Rights after the Treaty of Lisbon as an element of the substantive constitutionalisation of EU law', focused on core collective labour law rights and concepts (association, collective bargaining and collective action), exploring whether they should be regarded as integral parts of the EU constitutional order.
The thesis argued that a systematic constitutional reading of EU primary law under the light of the Union's fundamental normative values and objectives challenges the long standing perception of collective bargaining and strike action as obstacles to market access and economic freedoms. Rather, collective labour rights should be acknowledged as inherent elements of the EU social market economy, but, importantly, also as means of achieving the Union's economic and social objectives and its democratic aspirations. In 2023 the thesis was recognised by the ETUC as the runner-up for the ETUC/ETUI Brian Bercusson Award and is currently updated and expanded into a monograph.
In recent years, two other Caians received a Yorke prize: current Research Fellow Dr Orfeas Chasapis Tassinis (Law 2016), for ‘Revisiting the Theoretical Foundations of International Organizations in Public International Law’, and Dr Stevie Martin (Law 2016) for ‘Assisted Suicide and the European Convention on Human Rights’.