Being elected a Max Planck Law Fellow is the highest honour the Max Planck Law network can confer on scholars working outside the Max Planck Society. We are please to announce that Professor Ruth Mason is the latest to join four other distinguished Max Planck Law Fellows following nomination by Directors Wolfgang Schön and Ulrich Becker .
Ruth Mason is the Edwin S. Cohen Distinguished Professor of Law and Taxation and the Class of 1941 Research Professor of Law at the University of Virginia School of Law, as well as the Director of the Virginia Center for Tax Law. She lectures around the world and has been a visiting professor at several institutions, including Yale Law School, the University of Paris (Panthéon-Sorbonne), Vienna University of Economics and Business, and the International Bureau of Fiscal Documentation. She has served as national reporter for the United States to the International Fiscal Association and is a member of the American Law Institute. Her research focuses on federalism and the dormant Commerce Clause and cross-border taxation. Professor Mason’s work on comparative fiscal federalism has been cited by the U.S. Supreme Court and in an advocate general’s opinion for the Court of Justice of the European Union.
As a Max Planck Law Fellow, Professor Mason will lead the Max Planck Fellow Group: ‘Federalism and Solidarity’ and will split her time between MPI-Munich (Tax Law) and MPI-Munich (Social Law). Of the project, Professor Mason writes:
For decades, the study of fiscal federalism mostly has been limited to the study of questions of allocation, which ask which level—state or federal—is best to assess certain types of revenue and provide certain types of benefits, and to fiscal equalization, which involves money transfers among states. This project seeks to deepen our understanding of fiscal federalism, both descriptively and normatively. Deeper understanding of how federations work from a fiscal perspective may be needed to weather growing challenges from globalization, population ageing, inflation, and other pressures.
For more information about the project, see Professor Mason’s Max Planck Law Fellow page. A further in-depth news item on her appointment has also been published by MPI-Munich (Social Law).