Introduction : on the significance of revenue cases

Revenue law, in its widest sense, draws in all of the law relating to the imposition of taxes and related levies and the application of public services revenue. Opinions on the nature and purposes of revenue law divide sharply on ideological lines and are intimately related to political debates about the size of government and the objectives of the modern state. In this self-standing introduction, we examine three issues that are of central importance to Landmark Cases in Revenue Law. First, the purposes served by fine-grained legal analysis of revenue law cases. Most public discussion of revenue law is framed in non-jurisprudential terms, and most contributions to debate on taxation and the application of public services revenue more generally are not distinctively legal ones. We regard it as important to clarify exactly what detailed legal study of the cases on taxation can add to the study of taxation more generally. Secondly, the chapter considers the role of case-law in revenue law and, specifically, the qualities that might give a particular case ‘landmark’ status. In certain other legal subjects, case-law forms the bedrock of the subject itself; not so in revenue law, where instead legislation has centre-stage. Thirdly, we examine whether and to what extent revenue law cases may have wider significance. Tax law in particular has often been presented by lawyers, perhaps opportunistically, from the point of view of the taxpayer. Yet this is far from inevitable. How do the landmark cases on taxation throw light on questions of personal freedom and collective well-being respectively? By shifting the emphasis from the former to the latter, even to a limited extent, we aim to show how the preoccupations of revenue law discussion change correspondingly