Thursday 13 June 2013 at 17:30
Annual Lecture in Law and Society
Law and Social Illusion
Speaker: Professor Liam B Murphy, Herbert Peterfreund Professor of Law and Philosophy at New York University School of Law
Venue: Wolfson College Leonard Wolfson Auditorium
In the wake of the House of Commons Debate on tax fairness and increasing public outrage at tax avoidance by Google and other multinationals, Professor Liam Murphy of New York University will assess how misunderstandings of the ethical bases of the central legal institutions of a market economy badly distorts political debate on tax and other issues of social justice.
Professor Murphy will argue that, unlike some other parts of the law, the law of property and contract cannot plausibly be understood as attempts to enforce moral rights and duties that legal subjects have naturally, independently of law. They must be understood as Hume understood them: The legal rules of property and contract are artificial, or conventional, in that their justification lies in their effects on overall social welfare and justice.
The law of the market encourages a kind of everyday libertarianism in social attitudes. This illusion leads us to believe, for example, that pre-tax income and wealth represent moral entitlements that should be used as a baseline in discussions of tax justice.
The common criteria of tax fairness — vertical and horizontal equity — demand that those with more pre-tax income pay proportionately more tax, and that those with the same pre-tax income pay the same. But justice is not a matter of applying some equitable-seeming functions to a morally arbitrary initial distribution.
For further information and to reserve your place, please visit: www.fljs.org/TaxFairness
The Annual Lecture will be held in the brand new Leonard Wolfson Auditorium at Wolfson College.
For more information please see the event website
Organised by The Foundation for Law, Justice and Society in conjunction with Wolfson College and the Centre for Socio-Legal Studies
