The Structure and Organisation of EU Law in the Field of Direct Taxes

The central research question of this book is: What is the structure and organisation of EU law in the field of direct taxes? This book looks at how the elements of EU law in the field of direct taxes are arranged by the relations between them and how this organisation gives identity to EU law in the field of direct taxation as a whole; as a system. The most important idea of this book is that the body of case law is conceived as a network. I identify the 20 most important cases using a link analysis algorithm and extract the most important rules that have emerged from the case law by relying on the network structure and the granular information of legal citations. I claim that the Court aims to construct a cohesive judicial doctrine of EU law in the field of direct taxation through a dynamic process of judicial decision making which is based on the interpretative guidance of precedent