Samenvatting

The German lawyer / labour law professor Hugo Sinzheimer (1875-1945) has, in the first two decades of the twentieth century, contributed significantly to the legal recognition of the ‘collective labour agreement’. The imperative character of CLA provisions, now widely accepted all over the world, required a paradigmatic turn in the dominant private law perspective on labour relations. The paper tries to specify what made him able and prone to do this, both by reconstructing the legal and political discussion in Germany and the Netherlands and by relating elements of the process to social-scientific theories of institutional and intellectual innovation. I argue that his combination of commitments in various fields (legal practice, science, politics) allowed him to span the gap between the fields of labour relations and state law and to contribute to the constitutionalisation of labour relations.