Allison Christians

• JD, LL.M.
• Professor (Full) at McGill University

Who should tax multinationals? National political figures sometimes signal their assumptions by making superior or even exclusive claims about who may tax “their” multinational companies, and it is common to hear such companies or their incomes referred to as “belonging” to one nation or another. The rhetoric reflects conventional wisdom about sove...

Market prices fail to properly account for the risk of zoonotic diseases associated with animal agriculture and cross-border trade in domesticated and wild animal products, the magnitude of which is demonstrated by the COVID-19 pandemic. Corrective measures are required to internalize the cost of pandemics. Communicable disease prevention and mitig...

Currently at the forefront of internationals discourse is the notion that income should be taxed "where value is created." Far from being a well-worn tax mantra, this paper shows that the intuitively appealing but deceptively misleading claim plays on approximately a century of political compromise, equating the goal of assigning a 'primary' right...

The new US model income tax treaty contains an unusual addition: mechanisms for the parties to unilaterally override the negotiated treaty rates in specified circumstances. Previewed last year in proposed form — a first for Treasury — these new mechanisms work as kill-switches, partially terminating the treaty as to one or both treaty partners. The...

Canada’s Parliament plays little but a perfunctory role in the adoption of tax treaties, even though these agreements have significant impact on Parliamentary autonomy over core national budgetary matters as well as core legal and administrative functions. This article argues that Canada’s tax treaty process reflects a studied and intentional prefe...

The United States enacted a tax reform in 2010 known as the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act (FATCA), which will impose an extensive third-party monitoring and disclosure regime on financial institutions around the world in an effort to “smoke out” American tax cheats and expose their undeclared foreign assets to the U.S. Internal Revenue Service...

The story of our time may be the awakening of society to an epidemic of global tax dodging by the world’s elites. Citizens, watchdog groups, and even government officials are puzzled, frustrated, and sometimes outraged by the phenomenon, wondering where the nation-state lost its way in regulating its people and its resources, and why it is standing...

In its first term, the Obama administration enacted two pieces of legislation, each designed to protect an increasingly vulnerable income tax base, and each of which had the potential to set a new and unprecedented course for no less than the regulation of the global economy by the nation-state. The first, the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act (FA...

This document contains four installments of "The Big Picture," a column published in Tax Analysts, International Tax Notes, Volumes 66-68 (2012). The first installment, "Putting Arbitration on the MAP: Thoughts on the New U.N. Model Tax Convention," discusses the addition of mandatory arbitration to the UN Model Tax Treaty and argues that what is c...

Canadian National Report prepared for the Vienna University of Economics and Business, Conference on tax secrecy and transparency, Rust, Austria, July, 2012. The aim of the project is to assess how different countries regard the treatment of tax information and tax secrecy. Topics include the collection of data, the sharing of information domestica...

Activists around the world seek to expose a global system that fails to tax multinationals adequately and thus deprives governments of needed revenues, with profound effects for development in the world's poorest nations. These tax activists have sparked a global movement, with groups all over the world seeking progress for development in poor coun...

The terms “enterprise,” “business” and “business profits” are ubiquitous in U.S. and international tax law yet they are often ill-defined and under-theorized, especially in their interaction with other regulatory areas. This U.S. Report, commissioned for a comparative volume on the subject, focuses on the use and significance of these concepts from...

Every nation has an interest in sharing the gains they help create by participating in globalization. If governments fail to claim an adequate share of these gains, they will be forced to look ever more intensely to personal taxes on their own already-burdened citizens. Yet because of the structure of law and the mechanisms of legal decision-making...

Tax reform is a constant process in most nations as governments continuously revisit their tax regimes in response to economic, social, and political forces. Domestic legislative processes are the most obvious source of change in the tax system in any independent nation, but international events, institutions, and individuals"while comparatively mu...

This essay makes a proposal that might be controversial among tax scholars even if it is non-controversial to those with a particular interest in international law: that international social and institutional structures shape, and are shaped by, historical and contemporary domestic policy decisions. As a result, tax law scholars must seek a broad f...

Over the last ten years, legal scholars have begun to use what they describe as "case studies" in an effort to develop better theories about how governments can or should impose taxation on international activities. The attributes and function of case studies, while well-studied and documented in other disciplines, has not been explored in tax law...

After decades of directing global economic policy standards alone, the United States and Europe publicly extended leadership power to some developing countries in response to the economic crisis of 2008-2009. But an entrenched international architecture of tax policy expertise ensures that a small group of established players continue to shape tax...

One of the themes of this symposium issue is to explore the limits and possibilities of law and legal institutions in redressing poverty and economic inequality. This essay approaches the question by considering the ways in which domestic tax policy interacts with internationally-recognized human rights. I suggest that focusing on human rights juri...

Through decades of tax reform and cross-border collaboration, the world's wealthiest countries have adopted domestic tax policy norms that meet their mutually beneficial interests. But these norms have introduced rigorous change and increasingly rigid parameters for tax policy in the world's poorest countries. While much scholarly attention is devo...

Increasing economic integration inevitably draws states to coordinate their tax policies, yet policymakers are eager to protect their autonomous “tax sovereignty.” Tax cooperation and autonomy are balanced in transnational networks, especially the OECD, where state representatives, experts, and interest groups engage in continuous negotiation to de...

National tax policy is one product of the classic Lockean social contract between individuals and government. But countries are now so economically interdependent that one nation's tax policies can profoundly undermine another's attempts to implement the bargain. This article argues that tax experts from the United States and its peer countries are...

Why do countries follow the rules they do for international taxation? Tax scholarship is increasingly using terms like hard law and soft law to explain the degree of global adherence to various tax practices. In this brief essay, I make the case that terms we use are important because they convey something about how tax norms are being formed and h...

Social security is a fundamental part of workers' lives in three spheres: contributions are required, benefits are hoped for, and taxes on benefits may have to be paid. If a worker splits a career between several countries, each of these three spheres is affected. The United States has sought international coordination through a combination of trea...

The employee dispatched by her company to work temporarily in international destinations is not a new phenomenon, but social structures between which the worker may move have arguably never been more complex. In a world of social insurance programs that feature broad contribution requirements coupled with limitations on benefits, global workers may...

Tax treaties are believed to increase cross-border trade and investment by reducing international tax burdens. The pursuit of tax treaties is therefore advanced as an integral component of U.S. foreign aid policy, which increasingly favors indirect assistance in the form of fostering trade and investment over traditional direct assistance in the fo...