Via Legal
History Blog, we learned of the coming start of the 17th year of
the Boston College Legal History Roundtable.
In the fall of
2018, the Boston College Law School Legal History Roundtable started
its 17th successful year. The Roundtable draws on Boston College Law
School’s and Boston College’s strength and interest in legal history. It offers
an opportunity for Boston College faculty and faculty from other area
institutions, students, and members of the Boston College community to meet and
discuss a pre-circulated paper in legal history. Meeting several times each
semester, the Roundtable seeks to promote an informal, collegial atmosphere of
informed discussion.
For the
2018-2019 academic year, Professor Mary Sarah Bilder, Professor Daniel R.
Coquillette, Professor Frank Herrmann and Professor Daniel Farbman are
conveners.
The Roundtable
usually meets several times during the semester in the afternoon at 4:30 pm in
the Library Conference Room of the Boston College Law School Library.
Refreshments are available beginning at 4:15 pm.*
In 2018-2019,
our first Roundtable will be jointly sponsored with the BC Law School Tax
Policy Workshop and therefore meet at noon.
Papers will be
available when appropriate before each presentation.
For more
information, please contact:
Joan
Manna (617) 552-4344
For assistance
with parking passes for non-BC faculty, please also contact Joan.
Fall 2018
Thursday,
September 13 (12:15 pm)
Ajay K.
Mehrota, Professor of Law and Executive Director, American Bar Foundation and
Northwestern University Law School
Ajay K. Mehrotra is the Executive Director and a Research Professor at the
American Bar Foundation (ABF) and Professor of Law at the Northwestern
University Pritzker School of Law, and an Affiliated Professor of History at
Northwestern University. He is the author of Making the Modern American
Fiscal State: Law, Politics and the Rise of Progressive Taxation, 1877-1929(New
York: Cambridge University Press, 2013), which received the 2014 best book
award from the U.S. Society for Intellectual History. He is the co-editor
(with Isaac William Martin and Monica Prasad) of The New Fiscal
Sociology: Taxation in Comparative and Historical Perspective (New
York: Cambridge University Press, 2009). His writings have also appeared
in student-edited law reviews and interdisciplinary journals including Law
& Social Inquiry, Law & History Review, and Law &
Society Review. Mehrotra received his B.A. in Economics from the
University of Michigan, his J.D. from Georgetown, and his Ph.D. in American
History from the University of Chicago.
"The
VAT Laggard: A Comparative History of U.S. Resistance to the Value-added
Tax"
When one
examines how modern nation-states generate public revenue, the United States
quickly emerges as a striking outlier compared to other advanced industrialized
countries. Even a cursory review of statistics from the Organization for
Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) shows that the United States is out
of step with the rest of the developed world in the amount, and the way, it
raises tax revenue. One reason for this apparent American tax
exceptionalism is the absence of a U.S. national consumption tax. Whereas
nearly all other OECD countries have a national consumption tax, frequently in
the form of a value-added tax (VAT), the United States remains one of the few
countries without a consumption tax at the federal level.
This project
explores how and why the United States has historically rejected national
consumption taxes. Nearly all developed countries, and many in the
developing world, have some type of a national consumption tax, frequently in
the form of a value-added tax (VAT). The United States is an
exception. This project focuses on the fundamental question: why no VAT
in the United States? To address this overall research question, this
project explores three key historical periods. The first is the 1920s, when tax
theorists in the United States and Germany first began to formulate and propose
crude forms of value-added taxes. The second critical period is the decades of
the mid-twentieth century. During the 1940s, the United States once again
seriously considered but rejected national consumption taxes aimed at raising
revenue for World War II. Similarly, after the war, during the U.S. occupation
of Japan, American economic experts designed and implemented a proto-VAT for
Japan. The third crucial period is the 1970s and ‘80s. During these decades,
American lawmakers considered and even supported a U.S. VAT, but eventually
withdrew their support or were ousted from political office. At the same time,
other developed countries, such as Japan, Australia, and Canada, began to move
towards a national VAT. By focusing on these three key historical periods from
a comparative perspective, this project seeks to study how and why the U.S. has
failed to adopt national consumption taxes, such as the VAT.
Tuesday,
October 2 (4:30 pm)
Mitra
Sharafi, Professor of Law, University of Wisconsin-Madison
Mitra Sharafi is Professor of Law and Legal Studies at the University of
Wisconsin–Madison, with History affiliation. She is the author of Law
and Identity in Colonial South Asia: Parsi Legal Culture, 1772-1947 (Cambridge
University Press), which won the Law and Society Association’s Hurst Prize in
2015. She is currently working on her second book project, “Fear of the False:
Forensic Science in Colonial India” as a Davis Center fellow at Princeton’s
History department (fall 2018) and an ACLS Burkhardt fellow ’18 (National
Humanities Center, 2020-1).
"South Asians
at the Inns of Court: Empire and Expulsion circa 1900"
This paper
explores the disbarment proceedings of South Asian members of the Honourable
Society of the Inner Temple, one of the four Inns of Court for barristers in
London, circa 1900. Law students from across the British Empire attended the
Inns by the late nineteenth century, and the two disciplinary cases of A.K.
Ghose and S. Krishnavarma shed light on the imperial legal profession’s views
of racial and cultural difference; deception, education, and “good character”;
and loyalty to British rule.
