Events
Upcoming events
Discrimination Law and the Family
Part of the Inequalities Seminar SeriesTuesday 25 November, 12.30 - 1.30pm. In-person and online seminar. MAR 2.09.
Speaker: Professor Tarun Khaitan, Professor (Chair) of Public Law, LSE Law School
Discrimination law has traditionally only regulated the state and the market. Within these domains, discrimination law imposes its duties unidirectionally—the state may not discriminate against citizens, landlords against tenants, retailers against consumers, and so on, but not vice versa. I had argued previously that that discrimination law’s unidirectionality scrambles the classical liberal public-private divide from a binary distinction to a spectrum of publicness. Thus understood, discrimination law remains faithful to the liberal commitment to the public-private divide, while acknowledging—with feminists—that the personal can be political.
In this paper, I will apply this spectral understanding of publicness to assess discrimination law’s choice to only regulate discrimination in the state and the market, and not within the family. In this paper, I will argue that discrimination law’s failure to regulate the family discriminates indirectly based on grounds such as sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, disability, pregnancy, age, and marital status. What is more, this discrimination is almost certainly unjustifiable under existing doctrine. Finally, I will speculate on some feasible ways in which discrimination law could regulate certain forms of discrimination within the family.
Should the UK have a wealth tax? The Wealth Tax Commission five years on
Co-hosted with LSE Law School and CenTaxMonday 01 December, 6.30 - 8.00pm. In-person and online event. Old Theatre, LSE Old Building.
Speakers:
Professor Arun Advani, Director of the Centre for the Analysis of Taxation (CenTax) and Associate Professor, Economics Department, University of Warwick
Emma Chamberlain, Visiting Professor, Faculty of Law, University of Oxford
Dr Andy Summers, Director of the Centre for Analysis of Taxation (CenTax) and Associate Professor, LSE Law SchoolJoin us at this event to explore how the wealth tax conversation has evolved and whether the UK should be looking to implement a wealth tax today.
In 2020, the Wealth Tax Commission brought together world-leading academics, policymakers and tax practitioners to ‘think big’ about tax policy. Published in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic and the public finance crisis it triggered, the Commission examined the viability of both annual and one-off wealth taxes. Comprising over thirty papers and half a million words, it remains the most comprehensive body of evidence on wealth taxation globally.
Five years on, the question of how governments can meet increasing public service demand, while confronting escalating geopolitical and environmental challenges, is more urgent than ever. At this event, the Commission’s authors reunite to reflect on its influence on research, policy making and public debate, and share what they learned from the process and the viability of a wealth tax in the UK today.
Local Cost of Living and the Geography of Inequality: Evidence from Spain
Part of the Inequalities Seminar SeriesTuesday 2 December, 12.30 - 1.30pm. In-person and online seminar. CBG 2.03.
Speaker: Dr Beatriz Jambrina Canseco, Research Officer, Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative
Standard measures of poverty and income inequality often overlook how sharply the cost of living varies across places. To address this issue in the case of Spain, I develop a new public database of local consumer price indices tailored to the expenditure patterns of different income groups. Using these local CPIs to deflate household incomes between 2006 and 2022 reveals that national inflation adjustments understate inequality growth during the financial crisis and misrepresent poverty -- overestimating it in rural areas and underestimating its impact in larger cities. The findings highlight the importance of accounting for spatial variation in prices in poverty and inequality measurement, with clear policy implications.
Billionaire Responses to the Recently Increased Appetite to Tax their Wealth
Part of the Inequalities Seminar SeriesTuesday 9 December, 12.30 - 1.30pm. In-person and online seminar. KSW.G.01.
Speaker: Professor Marlies Glasius, Professor in International Relations, Department of Politics, University of Amsterdam
The super-rich (worth $50 million or more) avoid and evade wealth-based taxation a great deal, but little is actually known about how, how much and why the people at the very top of the wealth chain avoid taxation. In this talk I will present a new dataset on the responses of the hundred richest billionaires in democracies to various forms of wealth-based taxation. We gathered data about their personal characteristics, their public statements about wealth-based taxation, and their tax minimization behaviour between 1991 and 2024. Based on open sources including business journalism, tax advocacy, offshore leaks and lawsuits, it considers their material, legal and discursive responses to wealth-based taxation. Findings to date include important changes in the extent and nature of billionaire speech about wealth-based taxation since the global financial crisis, as well as shifts away from the use of tax havens to other forms of transnational or domestic tax minimization.
Previous Events
Catch up on all of our past events here.