Comparative Fiscal Federalism: What Can the U.S. Supreme Court and the European Court of Justice Learn From Each Other's Tax Jurisprudence?

Last October, a group of distinguished tax experts from the European Union and the United States convened at the University of Michigan Law School for a conference on "Comparative Fiscal Federalism: Comparing the U.S. Supreme Court and European Court of Justice Tax Jurisprudence." The impetus for the conference, the first of its kind, was a series of decisions by the European Court of Justice (ECJ) in the last 20 years, but with increasing frequency in the last five. In those decisions the ECJ interpreted the Treaty of Rome (the "constitution" of the EU) aggressively to strike down numerous member state income tax rules on the grounds thta they were discriminatory. This article previously was published in The Journal of the International Institute, a publication of University of Michigan International Institute, and appears here with permission.