Professor Catherine Brown delivered a paper on “Rectifying Tax Mistakes versus Retroactive Tax Laws: Reconciling Competing Visions of the Rule of Law” at the Jurisprudential Perspectives on Taxation Law Conference hosted by Cornell University Law School on September 24. The paper, co-authored with Professor Art Cockfield of Queen’s University examines the potential conflict between the right of the provinces to determine matters with respect to property rights including the equitable right of rectification and the federal government’s right to enact retroactive legislation. The paper attempts to balance the conflicting perspectives of provincial court judges and federal tax legislation with the requirements of the doctrine of the rule of law as adumbrated by Dicey, Rawls, Hayek, Raz, and Fuller to determine which should prevail.
University of Calgary
Faculty of Law
