Tax law is political. This book highlights and explains the major themes and methodologies of a group of scholars who challenge the traditional claim that tax law is neutral and unbiased. The contributors to this volume include pioneers in the field of critical tax theory, as well as key thinkers who have sustained and expanded the investigation into why the tax laws are the way they are and what impacts tax laws have on historically disempowered groups. This volume, assembled by two law professors who work in the field, is an accessible introduction to this new and growing body of scholarship. It is a resource not only for scholars and students in the fields of taxation and economics, but also for those who engage with critical race theory, feminist legal theory, queer theory, class-based analysis, and social justice generally. Tax is the one area of law that affects everyone in our society, and this book is crucial to understanding its impact.
This essay endeavors to document and to preserve the story of the origins of the book Taxing America (NYU Press 1997) edited by Karen B. Brown and Mary Louise Fellows. The publication of that text was a key milestone in the development of critical tax theory as an intellectual discipline. By identifying and bringing together lawyers and scholars with an interest in the political and discriminatory aspects of tax law, Professors Brown and Fellows created one of the first working groups of critical tax theorists. In this essay, the book's two editors reflect on the book's intellectual antecedents and its material creation. The editors describe the book's reception and influence. Together the essay's three authors consider the future of critical tax theory.
No study of Black people in America can be complete without considering how openly discriminatory tax laws helped establish a racial caste system in the United States, how they were designed to exclude blacks from lucrative markets and the voting franchise, and how tax laws extracted and redistributed vast sums of black wealth. Not only was slavery nearly a 100% tax on black labor, so too was Jim Crow apartheid and tax laws specified the peculiar institution as “negro slavery.” The first instances of affirmative action in the United States were tax laws designed to attract white men to the South. The nineteenth-century Federal Tariff indirectly redistributed perhaps a majority of the profits from slavery from the South to the North and is the principle reason the Confederate states seceded. The only constitutional amendment obtained by the Civil Rights Movement is the Twenty-Sixth Amendment abolishing poll taxes in federal elections. Blending traditional legal theory, neoclassical economics, and a pan-African view of history, these six interrelated essays on race and taxes demonstrate that, even in today’s supposedly post-racial society, there is no area of human activity where racial dynamics are absent.
At a moment when Australia -- and the world -- finds itself at a 'critical juncture' as it reckons with a global pandemic as well as the inequalities that COVID-19 has laid bare, voicing -- and listening to -- critical tax perspectives has become more vital than ever. The economic impact of COVID-19 has precipitated talk of tax reform as nations consider how to pay for aid distributed during the pandemic and how to restart their economies. But more than just a time of crisis, the pandemic can be seen as an unexpected opportunity to break with a past plagued by social and economic inequalities, to rethink our relationships with each other, and to begin the work of building better and more just societies. If this opportunity is to be meaningfully seized, then tax law and policy rightfully belong at the heart of the discussion.
This volume presents a new approach to today’s tax controversies, reflecting that debates about taxation often turn on the differing worldviews of the debate participants. For instance, a central tension in academic tax literature - which is filtering into everyday discussions of tax law - exists between 'mainstream' and 'critical' tax theorists. This tension results from a clash of perspectives: Is taxation primarily a matter of social science or of social justice? Should tax policy debates be grounded in economics or in critical race, feminist, queer, and other outsider perspectives? To capture and interrogate what often seems like a chasm between the different sides of tax debates, this collection comprises a series of pairs of essays. Each pair approaches a single area of controversy from two different perspectives - with one essay usually taking a 'mainstream' perspective and the other a 'critical' perspective. In writing their contributions, the authors read and incorporated reactions to each other’s essays and paid specific attention to the influence of perspective on both the area of controversy and their contribution to the debate. With contributions from leading mainstream and critical tax scholars, this volume takes the first step toward bridging the gap between these differing perspectives on tax law and policy.
In this essay, the authors discuss the intellectual foundations for their co-edited book, Feminist Judgments: Rewritten Tax Opinions (2017), the first in a series of subject-matter specific volumes published in the U.S. Feminist Judgments Series by Cambridge University Press. Using only the facts and precedents in existence at the time of the original opinion, the contributors to this and other feminist judgments projects around the globe seek to show how application of feminist perspectives could impact, or even change, the holding or reasoning of judicial decisions. Underlying Feminist Judgments: Rewritten Tax Opinions is the belief that the study of taxation is inextricably linked to the study of inequality (and vice versa).Critical tax scholars often encounter resistance from those who contend that tax statutes are neutral. Yet by centering the perspective of historically disempowered groups, one exposes how the tax laws contribute to and play a role in maintaining racial and gender inequality, among other types of injustice. Rewriting tax decisions from a feminist perspective is an exercise in showing -- not telling -- how the tax law can be harnessed in furtherance of greater equality for all people. The authors proceed to introduce the essays in a symposium issue of the Pittsburgh Tax Review devoted to Feminist Judgments: Rewritten Tax Opinions. Eleven different individuals -- including recent law school graduates, practicing attorneys, long-time teachers of U.S. tax law, and colleagues who study tax, but primarily systems other than that of the United States -- contributed essays. Their topics include feminist statutory interpretation generally and reviews of individual rewritten opinions that address topics including tax benefits for married individuals; the deductibility of costs associated with gender confirmation surgery; and the masculine quality of certain business deductions. Colleagues from Sweden and Australia consider persistent gender bias and the role tax law could and should play in its elimination. Other contributors find inspiration in the book for their own teaching, learning or scholarship, offering suggestions for using the feminist judgments in the classroom, or to inspire statutory reform that rewards unpaid care and service work.
