Saturday, June 5, 2004

Guest blogger Walter Schwidetzky (Baltimore) reports on the Paris meeting of the European Association of Tax Professors (see prior post here):

Let me start by saying that I am typing this on a French keyboard, which is quite different from a US one, so bear with me.

I started the conference by going to the wrong place, the French Senate (where tonight’s dinner is being held).T hey were very nice and got me to the right place. Today’s meeting is at the Sorbonne in an amazing room. Cardinal Richeliou looks down from the front, Descartes from the side and Mollier from the back. The seats are also amazingly uncomfortable.

In mant ways Europe is where the US was before the Civil War. Most of the power is in the member states and the EC IS trying to figure out how much power to give to the central authority. The European Court of Justice is fairly powerful within its domain, and can force a state to change its tax laws if they are discriminatory (French taxed higher in Germany than Germans) and also if they contain “restrictions” (forcing the French in Germany to use a German accounting system…not discriminatory as such, but it gets in the way of a unified market). Those were two of the main topics today, ie when those two sets of rules can apply. It was fairly apparent that civil law professors were more uncomfortable with the power of the ECJ than the Brits, since the ECJ is really developing common law and has a lot fo power, not things the civil law profs are that accustomed to.