John Prebble

Position

Professor

Qualifications

BA LLB(Hons) Auckland, BCL Oxford,
JSD Cornell, Inner Temple

Profile

Professor Prebble’s main teaching and research interests are in income tax law, with specializations in basic principles of receipts, expenditure, and timing, international taxation, and anti-avoidance rules. He has developed the sub-discipline, “Jurisprudential Perspectives of Taxation Law”, which examines judicial reasoning in taxation cases from the perspective of legal philosophers. Professor Prebble has advised several governments on matters of tax reform and was a member of the New Zealand government’s consultative committees on corporate taxation and international taxation in the 1980s and of the Committee of Experts on Tax Compliance in 1998. He has subsidiary interests in private international law and the law of elections. He has received a number of awards, most recently the medal of the Australasian Tax Teachers’ Association, 2006.

Current Research Project/s

As Henry Lang Fellow of the Institute of Policy Studies, Wellington, in 2006, Professor Prebble is working on a number of aspects of anti-avoidance rules. These projects include two articles on retrospectivity in tax legislation, to appear in the New Zealand Universities’ Law Review in 2006, a colloquium and master class on 31 July 2006 to bring together postgraduate students and scholars with expertise from six countries to compare the operation of the general anti-avoidance rules of some common law countries with the civil law doctrine of fraus legis, and continuing work on the operation of section BG 1 of the New Zealand Income Tax Act 2004. In the area of Jurisprudential Perspectives of Taxation Law he has work under way that applies the writing of the philosophers Lon Fuller, Hans Vaihinger, and Niklas Luhmann to reasoning in taxation cases. He will conduct a series of seminars on these and related topics at King’s College London on 13 and 14 September 2006.

Teaching

LAWS 365, 2010
LAWS 516, 2010

Link to Teaching Materials

Memberships

Fellow, Society for Advanced Legal Studies, London
Advisory Board, International Bureau of Fiscal Documentation, Amsterdam
Advisory Board, Journal of Australian Taxation
Editorial Board, New Zealand Journal of Taxation Law and Policy
Editorial Board, eJournal of Tax Research
Senior Fellow, Taxation Law and Policy Research Institute, Monash University
Wellington District Law Society
International Fiscal Association
International Tax Planning Association
Society of Legal Scholars
Tax Research Network
Australasian Tax Teachers Association

Selection of Publications

Choice of Law to Determine the Validity and Effect of Contracts: a Comparison of English and American Approaches to the Conflict of Laws (1972) University Microfilms, Ann Arbor, Michigan i-x, 1-435, also published in (1973) 58 Cornell L. Rev. Part I 433-536, Part II 635-732.

The Taxation of Property Transactions, Butterworths, 1986, (winner of the JF Northey Prize).

“Why Is Tax Law Incomprehensible?” in S James (ed) Taxation, Vol II, Critical Perspectives on the World Economy Routledge, London 2002 221 – 237. Reprint of “Why Is Tax Law Incomprehensible?” (1993) Victoria University of Wellington Inaugural Addresses, 2d Series 1-21. Also published in (1994) British Tax Review 380-393.

“Income Taxation, a Structure Built on Sand” (2002) 24 Sydney Law Review 301 (Inaugural Parsons Memorial Lecture, University of Sydney, 2001).

Taxation of Offshore Income, Fiscal Publications, Birmingham, 2006.

Publications List

Professor Prebble's personal page

Professor Prebble’s Scholarly Papers

Text of selected publications available here