Comparative Perspectives on Revenue Law: Essays in Honour of John Tiley by John Avery Jones, Peter Harris and David Oliver (eds)
| Author | Kazi Rahman |
| Date | 01 November 2010 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-2230.2010.00832_4.x |
| Published date | 01 November 2010 |
object to the translators’perhaps undue reluctance to use English‘equivalent’phrases
lest the Anglophone reader should assume that the meaning is the same as in the
common law, considerable thought and skill has been put into this thankless process.
If one accepts that an element of arbitrariness is unavoidable and that consistency in
the target language (English in this case) is as important as the choice of terms, it can
only be hoped that the present translationwill be taken as a starti ng pointby scholars
working on the law of obligations in English and in French; and that a degree of
uniformity can gradually be achieved on this front.
At the end of the day,should we wish good luck to the Catala project?The answer
is emphatically no: the French Civil Code is at the end of its rope. For anyone who
values truth over self, exporting it ^ as any commodity ^ or allowing French law to
‘stand its ground’ in the process of Europeanisation of private law should not be an
end in itself.What France needs is a new Code, taking into consideration a hundred
years of legal advances in both major legal traditions since the German codi¢cation
of 1896.The Ava nt- projet, by putting on a few patches and putting o¡, as a result, the
prospect of serious reform, is, in the present reviewer’s mind, best consigned to the
dustbin of history.The volume that the Oxford Institute of European and Compara-
tive Law has derived from it should, however, ¢nd its place on the shelves of any
private lawyer interested in French and English law.
Eric Descheemaeker
n
John Avery Jones, Peter Harris and David Oliver (eds), Comparative Perspectives on
Revenue Law: Essays in Honour of John Tiley
,Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press,2008), 327 pp, hb d68.00.
This is an eclecticcollection of eleve nessays on wideranging tax issues in honour
of the retirement of Professor JohnTiley, one of the world’s most celebrated tax
scholars. He is a leviathan in the sphereof taxation, and it is quitebe¢tting that his
retireme nt should be commemorated in this way. The ¢rst ¢ve chapters explicitly
discuss the perennial problems raised by tax avoidance in di¡erent jurisdictions,
and the last chapter implicitly engages with the same topic although in the con-
text of companies run by families in the UK.The ¢ve chapters in the middle pro-
vide a demonstration of how di¡erent areas interact with tax law and some
historical andpolitical issues that has shaped tax law.
The chapters on tax avoidance provide an in-depth analysis of the experience of
di¡erent jurisdictions in controlling tax avoidance. Broadly speaking, there are two
ways to do this: through legislation or through case law. These approaches are by no
means mutually exclusive, and many jurisdictions use a combination of both. Some
jurisdictions (such as Canada and New Zealand) rely mainly on legislation toprovide
general rules for the protectionof their tax base a nddepe ndo nthe courts to interpret
these rules and to determine the tax consequence of transactions which have limited
economic signi¢cance.Whereas other jurisdictions (such as the UK, the US and the
EU) rely primarily on the courts to develop judicial doctrines for interpreting tax
n
School of Law,University of Bristol
Reviews
108 9
r2010The Author.The Modern Law Review r2010The Modern Law Review Limited.
(2010) 73(6) 1076^1092
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