O Kahn-Freund

Sir Otto Kahn-Freund
Sir Otto Kahn-Freund in 1950.
Born	17 November 1900 Frankfurt am Main
Died	16 August 1979 Oxford
Citizenship	German
Education	Goethe-Gymnasium
Alma mater	Frankfurt University, London School of Economics
Occupation	Academic lawyer, judge
Employer	London School of Economics, Brasenose College, Oxford

Sir Otto Kahn-Freund QC (17 November 1900 – 16 August 1979) was a scholar of labour law and comparative law. He was a professor at the London School of Economics and the University of Oxford.

Kahn-Freund was born in Frankfurt am Main the only child of Richard Kahn-Freund and his wife, Carrie Freund. Although an agnostic he had a strict and conventional Jewish upbringing, and was very proud of this. He was educated at the Goethe-Gymnasium in Frankfurt, and then studied Law at the Frankfurt University.

He became judge of the Berlin labour court, 1929. Kahn-Freund wrote a pathbreaking article, contending that the Reichsarbeitsgericht (Empire Labour Court) was pursuing a "fascist" doctrine in 1931. According to Kahn-Freund, fascism shared liberalism’s dislike of state intervention and preference for private ownership, social conservatism’s embrace of welfare provision for insiders, and collectivism’s view that associations are key actors in class conflict. In the case law Kahn-Freund presented, the Reichsarbeitsgericht had been systematically undermining collective rights in work councils, demanding that trade unionists owed a duty to the Betrieb (the workplace) which was indistinguishable from the employer. On the other hand, the court had demanded that individual workplace rights (for instance, to social insurance) were strongly protected. The article was shunned by the German Legal Academy and the trade unions at the time, but in retrospect has been seen as tragically accurate. Kahn-Freund continued working as a judge until 1933, shortly after Hitler seized the Chancellorship in coalition with the conservative DNVP. He found that radio workers were falsely accused of being communist and were entitled to maximum damages for unfair dismissal. He was then dismissed by the Nazis in 1933. He fled to London and became a student at the London School of Economics.