Black Metropolis Research Consortium
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The Application of International Tax Treaties to Digital Services Taxes
Get PDFAs digital services and electronic commerce have become more prevalent aspects of the global economy, there have been concerns over how tax systems will adapt to this change. International tax treaties in particular seem to be outdated and unprepared for the digital economy. Many international tax treaties provide that businesses are to be taxed on their income only in jurisdictions where they have a sufficient physical presence. By establishing their European headquarters and digital servers in countries with low corporate income tax rates (such as Ireland) and then using those headquarters to provide digital services to the rest of Europe, large, sophisticated, multinational digital businesses have been able to generate much revenue from most European countries without paying significant taxes in those countries.
The issues surrounding digital tax laws made news headlines in the summer of 2019 when France passed a law that imposed a 3 percent tax on revenue earned from digital services in France. Scholars have suggested that this tax may violate existing tax treaties, arguing that it provides for the taxation of the income of businesses without a significant enough physical presence in the country imposing the tax. This Comment analyzes this potential violation with regards to the French digital services tax and the U.S.–France Treaty for the Prevention of Double Taxation. This Comment concludes that the French tax does not violate the Treaty because the tax is a consumption tax that falls outside the scope of the Treaty
China and Comparative International Law: Between Social Science and Critique
Get PDFThis Essay brings Abebe, Chilton, and Ginsburg’s Lead Essay into conversation with the literature on comparative international law to ask whether the social scientific approach to international law is “international.” In particular, this Essay takes the case of scholarship on international law in China to examine why or why not particular methodological and theoretical perspectives on international law may gain traction in certain jurisdictions’ legal academies. There are a number of linguistic, pedagogic, institutional, and, ultimately, political reasons why the Chinese scholarship that uses social science to understand international law is still nascent. At the same time, critical approaches to international law in the Chinese literature are ascendant. This Essay explains these divergent trends through a sociology of knowledge lens and offers provisional thoughts about future trajectories for the study of international law in a period during which China’s influence on the international system will most likely gro
Measuring the Art of International Law
Get PDFSocial science methodology is a useful adjunct to law, but it cannot replace the humanist ideas that constitute law. Scholars developed social science at the end of the nineteenth century and were soon using it to measure and assess material facts associated with far older intellectual disciplines like law. They have been able to confirm facts about such issues as the origins and impact of law. These studies rely, however, on a humanist definition of the object of the study. Humanist methods reveal that law is the result of transcendent concepts developed through natural law method. By the early twenty-first century, due to interest in social science and other factors, knowledge of humanism, especially around natural law, began to fade. This development has implications for the social science method, which relies on accurate characterization of law. More significantly, without knowledge of humanism, the reasons to respect and comply with law are fading. It is in the interest of social scientists and society in general to revive the humanism on which international law and all law depend. Law is simply more art than scienc
