CJEU – Recent Developments in Value Added Tax 2015

I. S. 103Introduction

‘La guerre! C’est une chose trop grave pour la confier à des militaires.’This phrase, generally attributed to Georges Clemenceau and literally translated as ‘War! It’s something too serious to leave to the military’ or more colloquially as ‘War is too important to be left to the generals’, implicitly raises a question that lies at the heart of this chapter, namely, whether adjudication of tax cases is ‘too important’ to be left to the specialists. More generally, this chapter examines the considerations favoring and disfavoring the creation of specialized tax courts in the context of multijurisdictional systems from the perspective of an observer from one such multijurisdictional system, the United States. In light of this book’s focus on the VAT case law of the Court of Justice of the European Union (Court of Justice), the chapter also attempts to identify the lessons, if any, that the American experience may hold for tax specialization at the European court level, particularly as it relates to VAT.

This chapter first considers the pros and cons of judicial specialization, in general, including the application of these general considerations to tax adjudication (Part...