Two Tax Conferences of Note

My good friend John Prebble alerts me to two upcoming conferences of interest, one in the States and the other in Australia.  First, he recently issued a call for papers for the Victoria-Cornell Colloquium on Jurisprudential Perspectives of Taxation Law, which will be held at Cornell on Sept. 24-25 (You might like to work this in if you already planning on going to IFA Boston, to be held Sept. 30-Oct 4).   Prof. Prebble and Brad Wendel are co-convening the colloquium, and they are particularly keen to hear from authors interested in applying either or both coherence theory (such as the writing of Ken Kress) and the work of Ludwig Wittgenstein to the analysis of judicial reasoning in leading tax cases.   Heady stuff!  The conference abstract looks fascinating:

"The colloquium will focus on analytical and normative legal philosophy as applied to income tax law, examining judicial reasoning in income tax cases. Seminars will examine such questions as: do legal philosophers’ expositions of the nature of law adequately explain the nature of income tax law? What light do theories of jurisprudence that have not traditionally examined income tax law shed on this question? What is the relationship between law and morality in the context of income tax? Contributions are welcome on all topics of taxation law. (Discussion will generally not be concerned with broad topics of fiscal policy, or, for instance, on whether governments should use taxes to redistribute wealth.)"

That's an unusual set of questions and I look forward to seeing the papers.  The other conference is to be held in Melbourne on Thursday and Friday July 19-20, 2012, and is entitled Defining, Taxing and Regulating Not-for-Profits in the 21st Century.  This is a very timely topic in the U.S. and, it seems, in a lot of other places too.  Here is the conference abstract:

The aim of the conference is to enable academics and other experts to reflect, from theoretical and comparative perspectives, on the theme of defining, taxing and regulating the not-for-profit sector. The conference coincides with a very active period of not-for-profit law reform in Australia, with the establishment of a new national regulator, the statutory definition of charity and other changes to the taxation and regulation of charities and other not-for-profit entities.

The conference features an international cast of characters and should provide a very welcome addition to the comparative tax literature.  Thank John P for bringing these to my attention!