The James Hausman Tax Law & Policy Workshop
presents
Judith Freedman
University of Oxford Faculty of Law
Rethinking legal taxonomies for the gig economy
Wednesday, February 27, 2019
12:30 - 2:00
Solarium (room FA2), Falconer Hall
84 Queen's Park
Abstract: Both tax law and employment law incentivize engagers of labour to structure their workforce as a crowd of self-employed micro-entrepreneurs. Recent technological change and the rise of the gig economy have made it easier for agents to respond to these incentives, contributing to an increase in self-employment. In this article, we review the evidence on the rise of the gig economy in the UK and lay out a set of key principles to guide the reform of tax and employment law to better enable policy to meet its underlying objectives
Judith Freedman is Professor of Taxation Law and a Fellow of Worcester College. She worked in the corporate tax department of Freshfields before joining the University of Surrey as a lecturer in law in 1980. She then moved to the London School of Economics (LSE) with a secondment to the Institute of Advanced Legal Studies as Senior Research Fellow in Company and Commercial Law from 1989-92. Whilst at the LSE, she lectured and researched on tax and company law. At Oxford, her focus is taxation, particularly corporate and business taxation, with special interests in tax policy and design, small businesses,the interaction between law and accounting , tax avoidance, tax and corporate social responsibility, and the use of discretion in the administration of taxation. She participated in the establishment of the Oxford University Centre for Business Taxation and is now its Director of Legal Research and a member of its Steering Committee and Advisory Board. She has served on a number of Law Society, DTI and Inland Revenue Committees and advisory groups and was a member of the Company Law Review's working party on small companies . She is a member of the Office of Tax Simplification Consultative Committee on Small Business Taxation and was on the Tax Avoidance Study Group appointed to report to the Exchequer Secretary on the question of a General Anti-avoidance Rule. She has held the Anton Philips Visiting Chair at the University of Tilburg and is an Adjunct Professor in the Australian School of Taxation and Business Law, University of New South Wales. She is the general editor of the British Tax Review and is on the editorial boards of the Modern Law Review, the eJournal of Tax Research, The Canadian Tax Journal, The Australian Tax Review and The Tax Journal. She is a member of the Council and the Tax Law Review Committee of the Institute for Fiscal Sutudies, and was one of the few lawyers contributing to the Mirrlees report 'Reforming the tax system". Judith was appointed a CBE in the 2013 New Year's Honours List for her services to tax research and as an Honorary Fellow of the Chartered Institute of Taxation in January 2015. In 2016 Judith was elected a Fellow of the British Academy. Judith is currently a co-director of the MSc in Taxation in the Oxford Law Faculty.
For additional workshop information, please contact events.law@utoronto.ca
