Bad Laws Make Hard Cases: Halifax and the avoidance of inconsistent tax rules.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
1. Scope of this paper.2. The teleological element: an explicit or hidden requirement in every tax avoidance solution.3. Applied and avoided provisions in Halifax.Is there any purpose in the limitation of the right to deduct? 4. Pure-revenue raising provisions and tax avoidance. Scope of this paper.On February 21st 2006 the European Court of Justice delivered its ruling in Halifax 1 ."Halifax day" has been considered as marking the beginning of a new stage of evolution of the European VAT system 2 .Therefore the facts, the opinion of Advocate General Mr. Miguel Poiares Maduro 3 and the ruling itself have generated a great amount of interest among European commentators 4 .These contributions focus on a very wide range of topics related to the case and, generally, to VAT avoidance.Nevertheless even though great progress has been made on these issues the time has come for a more detailed analysis of the case.Leaving out other highly interesting topics, this paper will merely focus on one logical weakness of Halifax which has been already noted by some commentators 5 , but not in our opinion resolved.We are referring, in fact, to one element of the "two-part test" 1 ECJ judgment of 21 February 2006 in Case C-255/02 Halifax plc v CC & E. 2 J. Swinkels, "Halifax day: Abuse of Law in European VAT" [2006] International VAT Monitor, May-June 173 at p.173. 3 Opinion of Mr Advocate General Poiares Maduro delivered on 7 April 2005.Halifax plc, Leeds Permanent Development Services Ltd and County Wide Property Investments Ltd v Commissioners of Customs & Excise.Case C-255/02.European Court reports 2006 Page I-01609. 4 Both in critical and praiseworthy taste: M. Lang, "Rechtsmissbrauch und Gemeinschaftsrecht im Lichte von Halifax and Cadbury Schweppes" [2006]
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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 | 0.005 | 0.020 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.010 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.013 | 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".