Restitution of Unlawfully Levied Taxes: Survey and Comparative Analysis of Developments in Canada, Australia, and England
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The common law traditionally has not been sympathetic to taxpayers wishing to recover unlawfully levied taxes from public authorities. Because a mistake of law did not, as a general rule and in itself, give rise to a right to restitution, and because courts refused to find that the mere fact that monies had been demanded by public authorities amounted to compulsion, taxpayers were often left without a remedy. Fortunately, important judicial developments have occurred in Canada, Australia, and England in the past decade. The demise of the infamous mistake of law rule and the recognition in England of the Woolwich principle have facilitated the recovery of unlawfully levied taxes. Yet, these developments have revealed profound differences as to which defences should be made available to public authorities. The "fiscal chaos" and "passing on" defences proposed by three Justices of the Supreme Court of Canada in the Air Canada case have not been well received in Australia and England. This article traces the evolution of the traditional common law approach to the problem of unlawfully levied taxes, offers a survey of the judicial developments in this area since the past decade and proposes a comparative analysis of the approaches adopted in each jurisdiction.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.011 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.012 | 0.024 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".