Wednesday 19 May 2010 at 1230
EU Law Discussion Group
The Constitutional Role of the Court of Justice in the Internal Market Post-Harmonisation: Tax Exceptionalism or Jurisprudential Consistency?
Cancelled
Speaker: Rita de la Feria and Dimitrios Doukas, Oxford University and Queens University Belfast
Venue: Institute of European and Comparative Law IECL Foyer (lunch) and Seminar Room C
The paper critically examines the impact of the hierarchy of norms within the EU legal order, and its interaction with the pre-emption principle, on the constitutional function of the Court of Justice. The emphasis is placed on the limits set by the primacy of the Treaties to the preemptory effect of secondary EU law in fields of the internal market, which have been harmonised. The standards applied to the fundamental freedoms are contrasted to the Court’s approach to the tax area. The paper questions whether the latter may be evidence of a tax exceptionalism. It is suggested that if this is the case, the Court of Justice should abandon its exceptional approach to the field of taxation and align its standards with the ones applied to other internal market policy areas which have been subject to EU harmonisation measures, such as the free movement provisions. Rita de la Feria is a Senior Research Fellow at the Centre for Business Taxation, Oxford University. In 2006, she completed her PhD on EU VAT harmonisation at the Law School of the University of Dublin, Trinity College. She is the author of the book The EU VAT System and the Internal Market (Amsterdam: IBFD, 2009), co-editor of the forthcoming compilation on Prohibition of Abuse of Law – A New General Principle of EU Law? (Oxford: Hart Publishing, 2010), and the editor of the loose-leaf A Handbook of EU VAT Legislation (The Hague: Kluwer Law International, 2004). Dimitrios Doukas is Lecturer in European Law at Queen’s University Belfast. He is a graduate of the Aristotle University of Thessalonika, Greece (LLB and LLM), and the University of Hamburg, Germany (PhD). He is the author of the monograph Werbefreiheit und Werbebeschränkungen (Freedom of Advertising and Restrictions) (Baden-Baden: Nomos, 2005), and is currently working on a monograph on Media Law and Market Regulation in the European Union (due by the end of 2011 with Hart Publishing).
For more information please see the event website or contact: Jenny Dix
Organised by the EU Law Discussion Group in conjunction with Institute of Ejuropean and Comparative Law
