Tax and Citizenship: an exploration of how taxes impact on societies
Location:
Teaching Room 07
Edinburgh Law School
Old College
South Bridge
Edinburgh
EH8 9YL
Date/time
Wed 22 June 2022
17:00-18:30
Tax and Citizenship: an exploration of how taxes impact on societies
(Tax) Citizen of the World
Dr Yvette Lind, Assistant Professor at Copenhagen Business School
The study aims to shed new light on the legal underpinnings of taxation, formal citizenship, and taxpayer protection, when combined, and against this backdrop, undertake a study of what appropriate protection may entail when considering transnational taxpayers as stakeholders in society. Therefore, the research problem concerns 1. the inequality between globally mobile individuals caused by taxation and access to citizenship with subsequent rights and benefits, and 2. the legal (tax) protection of transnational taxpayers.
The study is to a large extent comparative, but with the ambition of integrating an interdisciplinary approach which combines traditional legal scholarship with sociology and political philosophy when contextualising and analysing the interlinking between taxation, formal citizenship, and taxpayer protection.
Poll Taxes, Revisited
Prof. Jeremy Bearer-Friend, Associate Professor at George Washington University Law School
In an era where poll taxes are generally derided, pursued only underhandedly, and denied by their own framers, any criticism of poll taxes is an easy case. Rather than adopting the more predictable normative position of rejecting poll taxes, this paper seeks to extract what tax scholars and tax policymakers still have to learn from poll taxes.
What emerges from my research on four distinct poll taxes applied by Anglophone governments in the 20th century is a new baseline for evaluating the administration of nonpoll taxes, new evidence of the ways neutrality in statutory language cloaks the use of tax as a political weapon, and an enriched understand of the relationship between taxpaying and citizenship that goes beyond voting rights.
This event is free and open to all but registration is required (link below)