Martinez on Tax Policy, Structure and the Importance of Legal Scholarship

On March 16, Dean Emeritus Leo Martinez spoke at the European Law Faculty Association Annual Meeting held at the Universitat Muenster. His topic was The Overlooked Role of Legal Scholarship: The Unity of Research and Teaching. Martinez also recently published Structural Impediments to Tax Reform: The Environment as Case Study, which appeared in the Florida Tax Review this month. From the abstract, “While the goal of any system of taxation is to be fair, however elusive the concept of fairness, there are two kinds of obstacles that impede or affect our ability to be fair. I categorize these two kinds of obstacles as those that resound in politics and those that are structural. This article deals with the structural aspects of how we go about taxing ourselves. The politics of taxation I leave for another day.”