Event Description

Convener: Yvette Lind

Tax is storytelling. And the Biden Administration is elevating different narratives as it weaves its own story of the tax changes the country needs and how those changes will strengthen the fabric of American society.  As of August 2021, portions of the Administration’s proposals have become law.  Others face an uncertain path to enactment.  A rare bipartisan spirit emerged in the same month in the U.S. Senate’s passing of a significant infrastructure bill. But legislation to advance the Administration’s other goals—particularly tax changes and spending programs targeted toward benefiting low- and middle-income individuals and families—may be a harder lift.  In “Tax Narratives: A Critical Tax Perspective on the Biden Tax Plan,” I situate the Administration’s proposals that aim to address childcare, healthcare, and education access within domestic and international contexts.  Specifically, I highlight the influence of critical tax work begun decades ago on the proposals advanced by the Administration and consider how those proposals, if passed, would position the United States alongside similarly situated nations.  As it draws upon well-developed ideas from the critical tax literature, the Administration is advancing policies once considered radical in the domestic context but that have broad acceptance in other nations.  But one could be forgiven for missing these connections, as such history and parallels are largely muted in the Administration’s materials and President’s speeches on the topic. “Tax Narratives” aims, then, to explore both the substance and story of the Administration’s proposals—the interplay between technocratic solutions and the narratives that shape (and sell) them.


American presenter: Associate professor Tessa Davies, University of South Carolina School of Law

Tessa Davis is an Associate Professor of Law specializing in taxation and tax policy. Professor Davis focuses her research on the ways in which tax law and policy are influenced by cultural context, exploring the intersection of tax with topics such as immigration, the family, and the body. Her scholarship has appeared in the Denver Law Review, the Virginia Journal of Social Policy & the Law, the Florida State University Law Review, the Kentucky Law Journal, the Cardozo Journal of Law & Gender, the Florida State University Journal of Transnational Law & Policy, and the George Mason Law Review. In addition, she has been an invited speaker at many schools Northwestern University, University of Michigan Law School, Pitt Law, University of Kentucky, and Davidson College.

Prior to joining the faculty at the University of South Carolina, Davis was a Visiting Assistant Professor at Tulane University Law School. Davis earned an LLM in Taxation in 2012 from New York University School of Law and received her JD from Florida State University College of Law, where she graduated Order of the Coif. Davis graduated from Davidson College with a BA in Anthropology, and received an MSc in Social Anthropology from the London School of Economics.

European discussants:

Professor Sigrid Hemels, Erasmus University Rotterdam
Sigrid Hemels is professor of tax law at the Erasmus School of Law (ESL) of the Erasmus University Rotterdam, visiting professor in tax law at the Lund University School of Economics and Management and member of the tax team of Allen & Overy LLP, Amsterdam. She has various research themes within the tax field including tax incentives for charities and the arts, income taxation and gender equality, exchange of information and European tax law. She is a regular contributor to the Dutch financial newspaper het Financieele Dagblad on topics of tax and public finance.



Associate Professor Karen Boll, Copenhagen Business School 
Karen Boll is Associate Professor at Copenhagen Business School. Karen conducts ethnographic and qualitative studies of tax authorities’ work, business’ tax compliance practices and collaborative tax regulation. Karen’s work has been innovative in seeing tax compliance as an assemblage of relations and actors, and groundbreaking in her access to studying tax administration in both Denmark and Sweden. Karen’s work on taxation has been published extensively in journals such as Journal of Organizational Ethnography, Nordic Tax Journal, Critical Perspectives on Accounting, Journal of Cultural Economy, Journal of Tax Administration and Accounting, Organizations and Society.