AbstractThis paper seeks to contrast the prevailing economic justifications in favour of the ongoing deregulatory reforms (based on the need for greater certainty in terms of firing costs for businesses) with an alternative “liability based” economic approach. Eventually the scope is to ascertain whether, from a purely juridical viewpoint (and also from a Law and Economics perspective), the current legislative trend in labour law is consistent with the initially declared purposes or not. More specifically, the comparison between two very different employment protection systems (i. e., the Italian and the British ones) can show how the current legislative trend based on the predictability of firing costs is only partially consistent with the declared objectives, whereas it could play a much larger role as a hermeneutical tool used in a more business-oriented interpretation of traditional legal notions (among Italian scholars, so-called “categorie”), such as the one of dismissal on “subjective” grounds.