Anthem Critical Introductions – serie

This book is designed to be a short, critical introduction to the controversies in tax policy. The main thesis of the book is that there is a deeper substructure to debates about tax policy that underlie many of the controversies. By understanding the nature of this substructure one can place the debates about tax policy into a broader perspective. The book elucidates this underlying architecture, drawing on ideas from economics, law, philosophy, psychology, and political science. It uses these tools to shed light on conventional debates on tax policy, such as whether to tax all sources of income or instead just tax consumption. It also touches on current and emerging debates. These include the appropriate goals for tax reform, the most judicious way to tax multinational corporations, our ability to tax the very wealthy, and whether the tax system has a racial subtext.

This book is designed to be a short, critical introduction to the controversies in tax policy. The main thesis of the book is that there is a deeper substructure to debates about tax policy that underlie many of the controversies. By understanding the nature of this substructure one can place the debates about tax policy into a broader perspective. The book elucidates this underlying architecture, drawing on ideas from economics, law, philosophy, psychology, and political science. It uses these tools to shed light on conventional debates on tax policy, such as whether to tax all sources of income or instead just tax consumption. It also touches on current and emerging debates. These include the appropriate goals for tax reform, the most judicious way to tax multinational corporations, our ability to tax the very wealthy, and whether the tax system has a racial subtext.

This book provides a critical introduction to the multifaceted relationship between law and peace. It introduces the reader to different conceptions of both law and peace, highlighting non-dominant conceptions, and considers the historical and hegemonic dimensions of this relationship. One of the main objectives is to critique the ways in which law has tried, often unsuccessfully, to prevent and resolve armed conflict and to promote peace. The book draws on several critical theories, including postcolonial studies, feminist and queer approaches as well as legal pluralism, to review the prevailing (neo-)liberal legal approaches to peace and peacemaking and their focus on state sovereignty, national interests, and state-based institutions. Emphasizing the plural nature and relational aspects of law and peace, the book seeks to challenge common assumptions about law and peace and outlines further opportunities for law to play a more constructive role in this regard.

Histories of migration policy are common, but an intellectual history of migration law has not been written yet. The intellectual history of migration law is hidden, partly because of the secondary nature of migration policy (itself a function of demographic, economic or foreign policy), and partly because of migration law’s unsteady position between international law and administrative law. This book describes the intellectual history of migration law partly through scholarly interventions in migration law and policy and partly through policy innovation created by administrative officials during the last two centuries. Immigration law was born from creating limits to large-scale, mostly open migration during the last decades of the nineteenth century. It was created against a backdrop of free movement based on the natural law tradition, which has survived as a countercurrent ever since.