Dr Dominic de Cogan joined Birmingham Law School in 2011-12 as a Research Assistant after submitting his doctorate on the division of responsibility for UK tax law between legislators, the judiciary and the tax administration to the University of Cambridge.   He had previously worked for Pricewaterhouse-Coopers LLP for four years, beginning in Cambridge and later in Birmingham and London. After a very successful year he has been awarded the Leverhulme Trust's Early Career Fellowship award and is now Birmingham Law School's Leverhulme Early Career Research Fellow working on a project entitled "Tax professionals and the law: a healthy partnership?"

The Early Career Fellowship award from the Leverhulme Trust will support a project looking at the intimate relationship between tax law and the lawyers, accountants and others who must apply and advise on it in practice.  The focus will be on the means by which tax professionals exert systemic influence over the content and structure of the law, and the extent to which their immediate interests are balanced successfully against wider considerations such as the achievement of popular consent to taxation and the overall coherence of the system.  That these tensions are now a matter of considerable political interest, further to the activities of UK Uncut and similar organisations, only makes it the more urgent to examine the boundaries of an acceptable constitutional role for tax intermediaries in the UK.  The aim of the present project is to construct a robust theoretical framework to address such problems, and within which a wide range of views can be integrated.  

  • The Leverhulme Trust Early Career Fellowship - further information