The value of the book is as follows: the work is an exhaustive collection of all of the ECJ’s decisions on direct tax ever and as such is invaluable to practitioners who must now always consider the application of the ECJ’s case law on trade law, the fundamental freedoms, to domestic direct tax provisions. Critically, the work puts the direct tax case law in the context of the ECJ’s case law on trade law generally so that the work will be also very useful to Community Lawyers who practice EC Law generally.
Indeed, it is impossible to analyze the Court’s direct tax case law without putting that direct tax case law into the context of the free trade law cases. As far as I am aware, this is the first work which offers an analysis of the direct tax case law within the context of a thorough and rigorous analysis of the ECJ’s approach to trade law in general.
The work is an academic treatise on the approach and direction of the ECJ over the years and as such is useful to academics; although the distinction between academic and practitioners’ works in EC Law is blurred as the Court’s approach is itself very academic.