The source concept of income is difficult to pin down in Canadian income tax law. It is elusive and defies simple explication. Nowhere is this more true than in the context of gambling winnings. In this essay, the tax treatment of poker and other gambling winnings is used as a window into how...

Governments throughout the developed world worry incessantly about the implications of sophisticated tax planning for their tax revenues. And yet the same governments routinely stop short of doing all that they can legally do to combat tax avoidance. Why? One response is that a thick conception...

Contracts that contemplate alternative possible modes of performance, frequently referred to as alternative contracts, are common wherever written contracts are routinely used and relied upon. Nevertheless, courts in major legal systems have encountered enormous difficulty articulating a...

Until now the legal and regulatory measures that have been taken in the United States and Canada to combat excessive executive compensation have been largely ineffectual. The one possible exception is the tax deductibility cap of ý162(m) of the US Internal Revenue Code, which was introduced in...

The subject of this paper is the impact of the new globalized order on the integrity of corporate governance. Corporate governance is the system of laws, markets and institutions that seeks to control and discipline corporate activity in the service of the public interest. Over the last several...

With the growth of the gig economy, the employee / independent contractor distinction has received renewed attention in both the media and the courts. While rulings on the status of gig economy workers like Razak v. Uber Techs. Inc. and Lawson v. Grubhub Inc. have focused on the issue of...

Technological advancements in the last 10 years have made it possible to explore the application of data driven tools to the legal field. The problem, however, is that law is full of grey areas. Tax law in particular can be a very uncertain field, often precisely because of the many rules and...

Recent advances in artificial intelligence and machine learning have bolstered the predictive power of data analytics. Research tools based on these developments will soon be commonplace. For the past two years, the three of us have been working on a project called Blue J Legal. We started with...

Advance tax rulings are an increasingly common feature of mature income tax systems throughout the world. The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development's (OECD's) work demonstrates that there has been a trend from 1990 to 2013 among OECD member countries to adopt advance tax rulings...