The fundamental freedoms of the EC Treaty prohibit tax discrimination - harsher tax treatment of cross-border economic activities than purely internal activities. Critics of the ECJ argue that the Court's broad interpretation of the EC freedoms causes it to find tax discrimination where there is...

Prohibitions of tax discrimination have long appeared in constitutions, tax treaties, trade treaties and other sources, but despite their ubiquity little agreement exists as to how such provisions should be interpreted. This has led prior commentators to conclude that tax discrimination is an...

Scholars and courts recognize that the federal government uses its broad spending power to enlist states in achieving federal goals, thereby expanding the federal government’s reach beyond the areas enumerated for it in the Constitution. Similarly, the federal government can achieve similar...

This comment considers arguments for and against stricter regulation of sovereign wealth funds (SWFs), either by tightening securities laws or increasing the tax burden on SWFs. Concerns about SWFs fall into two broad categories: fears that (1) investments will be politically, rather than...

Different in more ways than it is possible to easily enumerate, the formation of the United States and the European Union (EU) had a striking similarity of purpose: to increase citizens' welfare by uniting a collection of independent states, each with its own politics, culture, and economy. Of...

The European Court of Justice (ECJ) has come under increasing criticism for overstepping its institutional authority in tax cases by invalidating national tax regimes that are not discriminatory. This Article offers an explanation for the ECJ's difficulties in tax cases. "Overlapping taxation,"...

Under the standard the European Court of Justice (ECJ) uses to evaluate tax discrimination cases, a Member State discriminates when it taxes cross-border economic activities more than “similar” purely domestic activities. To determine when this occurs, the ECJ compares the complaining...

This report describes and compares from a tax policy perspective two well-known spinoff-acquisition transactions: The innocent Morris Trust transaction and the abusive Viacom transaction. It examines alternatives to section 355(e) as enacted by Congress and closely examines the statutory...

We argue that the high revenue triggers in proposed digital taxes — including the recent Franco-German proposal for a digital advertising tax — may violate state-aid law and prohibitions on nationality discrimination in the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union.We explain how both...

The Deutsche Bahn doctrine holds that EU actions, as opposed to Member State actions, are immune from state-aid scrutiny. This interpretation has a textualist grounding: Because the EU Treaty bans only “aid granted by a Member State,” it does not constrain aid granted by the EU itself. This...