Present at the Creation: Archival Research and Evidence on the Origins of the Single Tax Principle
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This is the first of a series of articles on the origins of the so-called “single tax principle,” whose normative value has been denied or at least undermined by some tax legal scholars. It is based on archival research conducted at Harvard Law School Library - Historical & Special Collections on the unpublished Stanley S. Surrey’s papers and on unpublished minutes of meetings of the League of Nations available at the United Nations Archives in Geneva. The purpose is to contextualize and provide an historical background for the single tax principle by guiding the readers through these unpublished materials. It aims at identifying who theorized (Clavier) and practically implemented (Thomas Adams) the single tax principle at the international level as well as at domestic level (published and unpublished materials show that Adams and Surrey were the two main architects of both US international tax rules and the international tax regime). The author shows how the single tax principle originated in 1927 when Clavier theorized that, ‘international incomes be prevented from escaping taxation altogether is as desirable as that the same income shall not be taxed by several different countries;’ but only reached its maturity during the nine years 1957 – 1966 when Surrey, firstly, was successful in persuading Senate not to ratify Art. XV(I) of the Pakistan - US Income Tax Treaty (1957); secondly, adopted the Subpart F regime; thirdly, introduced the Investment or Holding Company article in the treaty with Luxembourg; and, finally, closed the loophole in the US-Canadian tax treaty. Claiming that the single tax principle does not have any normative value at all simply clashes with the above statutory provisions whose original intent was to suppress anomalies such as double exemptions as well as with what Martin Norr wrote in his 1964 Tax Law Review article, ‘the presumption that international income should pay tax at least once is becoming part of the common law of the Western industrial community, our new law merchant. If international income does not bear tax in some country, the burden will increasingly be on its recipients to justify the deviation from the norm.’
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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 | 0.021 | 0.062 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.008 | 0.013 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.018 | 0.036 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.019 | 0.025 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.008 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.010 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.009 | 0.001 |
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".