Four Days to Go: Taxation, Racial Capitalism, and the International Rule of Law
The ESIL Interest Group on European and International Rule of Law is pleased to announce that its forthcoming webinar, “Taxation, Racial Capitalism, and the International Rule of Law,” will take place on Wednesday, July 22, 2026, from 12:00 to 1:30 p.m. Eastern Time.
The webinar is also co-sponsored by the American Branch of the International Law Association (ABILA) and the International Law Association (ILA), Study Group on International Law, Global Challenges, and the Impact of Emerging Powers on Global Governance:
The event brings into dialogue two important books published in 2025:
Anthony C. Infanti, The Human Toll: Taxation and Slavery in Colonial America
New York University Press
Steven A. Dean, Racial Capitalism and International Tax Law: The Story of Global Jim Crow
Oxford University Press
Carliss N. Chatman will participate as discussant, and Paolo Davide Farah will chair and moderate the conversation.
About the conversation
Tax law is often presented as a highly technical field concerned with revenue collection, administrative efficiency, the definition of tax bases, and the allocation of taxing jurisdiction. The two books at the center of this webinar challenge that limited understanding.
Anthony C. Infanti’s The Human Toll examines how colonial tax systems supported and entrenched slavery. The book explores the classification of enslaved persons as taxable property, the use of fiscal measures to influence racial populations, and the payment of public compensation to slaveholders when enslaved persons were executed or killed under color of law. It also reveals how official fiscal records frequently preserved the names and claims of slaveholders while erasing or anonymizing the enslaved persons whose lives and deaths generated those claims.
Steven A. Dean’s Racial Capitalism and International Tax Law examines the emergence of the modern international tax system during decolonization. Through the concept of Global Jim Crow, the book considers how the movement of international tax authority from the United Nations toward the OECD, together with rules favoring residence over source taxation, constrained the fiscal sovereignty of newly independent states and redirected resources away from education, health, development, and other public priorities.
Read together, the books invite reflection on taxation as a form of legal and institutional ordering through which societies classify persons and property, distribute resources and vulnerability, structure markets and political authority, and determine whose claims, experiences, and knowledge are recognized.
The webinar will situate the books within broader debates concerning:
- taxation and racial capitalism;
- slavery, colonialism, and legal history;
- international tax law and fiscal sovereignty;
- governance, expertise, and institutional design;
- corporate power and private ordering;
- historical memory and the production of legal knowledge;
- reparations and reparative institutional design; and
- the relationship between formal legality, institutional legitimacy, and the rule of law.
Speakers
Anthony C. Infanti
Author of The Human Toll: Taxation and Slavery in Colonial America
Steven A. Dean
Author of Racial Capitalism and International Tax Law: The Story of Global Jim Crow
Carliss N. Chatman
Discussant
Paolo Davide Farah
Chair and Moderator
Registration
Participation is free and open to academics, students, practitioners, policymakers, and all those interested in international law, taxation, racial capitalism, legal history, reparations, global governance, and the rule of law.
The webinar forms part of the ESIL Interest Group on European and International Rule of Law Webinar Series, conceptualized, chaired, and moderated by Paolo Davide Farah.
For additional background, readers may consult the earlier post, “Launching the ESIL Interest Group on European and International Rule of Law Webinar Series”, which introduces the objectives of the new series and provides the complete description of this inaugural webinar, together with a selected bibliography of related scholarship by Anthony C. Infanti, Steven A. Dean, Carliss N. Chatman, and Paolo Davide Farah.
A second earlier post, “From Taxation to Epistemic Governance: Knowledge, Power, and the Reconfiguration of Global Order,” develops the broader conceptual framework connecting this webinar to questions of epistemic governance. It explains how the works of Anthony C. Infanti, Steven A. Dean, and Carliss N. Chatman illuminate not only taxation, racial capitalism, and historical injustice, but also the ways in which legal and institutional systems determine who produces authoritative knowledge, whose perspectives are recognized, how resources and power are allocated, and how competing visions of justice, development, and global order are legitimized. The post also situates the inaugural webinar within the wider intellectual vision of the ESIL Webinar Series and its connections with the newly established ILA Study Group on International Law, Global Challenges, and the Impact of Emerging Powers on Global Governance.
Selected Bibliography
Books in Dialogue
Dean, Steven A. (2025). Racial Capitalism and International Tax Law: The Story of Global Jim Crow. Oxford: Oxford University Press – Examines how international tax law has historically contributed to racialized structures of economic power and inequality on a global scale.
Infanti, Anthony C. (2025). The Human Toll: Taxation and Slavery in Colonial America. New York: New York University Press – Explores the relationship between taxation, slavery, and state-building in colonial America, highlighting the human costs embedded in fiscal and legal institutions.
Related Scholarship by Steven A. Dean
Racialized International Tax Law in Research Handbook on Critical Tax Studies (forthcoming Edinburgh University Press, Yvette Lind and Dominic de Cogan, eds.)
Fear of a Black Planet: Africa’s Decolonisation and the Transformation of the International Tax Regime in Taxing People: The Next 100 Years (Cambridge University Press 2026, Tsilly Dagan and Ruth Mason, eds.)
Filing While Black: The Casual Racism of the Tax Law, 2022 Utah Law Review 801, available at https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4081456
Inclusive International Tax Policymaking: FATCA, the U.S. Congressional Black Caucus, and the OECD Blacklist, Revue Européenne et Internationale de Droit Fiscal(2021) (Reprinted in Tax Notes International)
Ten Truths about Tax Havens: Inclusion and the ‘Liberia’ Problem, 70 Emory Law Journal1657 (2021) (with Attiya Waris), available at https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3822421
Dean’s SSRN Author Page https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/cf_dev/AbsByAuth.cfm?per_id=440250
Related Scholarship by Anthony Infanti
Our Selfish Tax Laws: Toward Tax Reform That Mirrors Our Better Selves (The MIT Press 2018).
Critical Tax Theory: An Introduction (Cambridge University Press, Anthony C. Infanti & Bridget J. Crawford eds., 2009). The Introduction is available at https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1333799
Internation Equity and Human Development, in Tax, Law and Development (Edward Elgar Publishing, Miranda Stewart & Yariv Brauner eds., 2013).
Tax Equity, 55 Buff. L. Rev. 1191 (2008), available at https://digitalcommons.law.buffalo.edu/buffalolawreview/vol55/iss4/5/
Tax and Time: On the Use and Misuse of Legal Imagination (NYU Press 2022), available at https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4006652
Tax Reform Discourse, 32 Va. Tax Rev. 205 (2012), available at https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2034869
Critical Tax Theory: Insights from the US and Opportunities for All, 51 Austl. Tax Rev. 81 (2022) (with Bridget J. Crawford), available at https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4236410
Infanti’s SSRN Author Page
Related Scholarship by Carliss N. Chatman
(2023). “Teaching Slavery in Commercial Law.” 28 Michigan Journal of Race & Law 1–38. SMU Dedman School of Law Legal Studies Research Paper No. 611. Available at SSRN: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3926671 – Examines how slavery and its enduring legacies can be more meaningfully integrated into the teaching and understanding of commercial law.
(2026). “The Contract and the Cure: Building a Private Infrastructure for Reparations.” In Slavery’s Long Tentacles: Entanglements in Historical and Modern Forms of Slavery (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming). https://ssrn.com/abstract=6140369 – Explores the role of private law, contracts, and institutional design in advancing reparative justice for the enduring harms of slavery.
(October 24, 2024). “1981”, 82 Wash. & Lee L. Rev. 1655 (2026), SMU Dedman School of Law Legal Studies Research Paper No. 666, Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=4998718 – Analyzes the continuing significance of 42 U.S.C. § 1981 and its role in addressing racial discrimination, equality, and access to economic opportunity.
(2018). “The Corporate Personhood Two-Step.” 18 Nevada Law Journal 811–862. Posted July 17, 2017; revised August 11, 2023. Chatman, Carliss, The Corporate Personhood Two-Step (June 25, 2017). 18 Nev. L. J. 811 (2018), Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=2992275 – Investigates how legal doctrines of corporate personhood shape corporate power, accountability, and the allocation of rights within modern governance systems.
Chatman’s SSRN Author Page https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/cf_dev/AbsByAuth.cfm?per_id=2419097
Related Scholarship by Paolo D. Farah
(2026). Epistemic Governance. Available at SSRN: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=6487038 – Develops a framework for understanding how knowledge, authority, expertise, and competing narratives shape governance structures, institutional legitimacy, and global ordering.
(2025) China’s Path to Modernization and Legal Pluralism: Transplants and the Belt and Road Initiative, Asian Journal of Law and Society, Cambridge University Press https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=5215873 – Examines how competing legal traditions, governance models, and development paradigms contribute to evolving forms of legal pluralism and the reconfiguration of global order.
(2024). “Energy Justice, Just Transition and International Environmental Law.” In ASIL Proceedings (Just Energy Transition: Legal Challenges Associated with Coal Phase Out), Cambridge University Press. Available at SSRN: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=5055884 – Explores how legal and governance frameworks shape the distribution of benefits and burdens during energy transitions, highlighting questions of historical responsibility, distributive justice, institutional legitimacy, and the role of law in addressing structural inequalities associated with climate and energy transformation.
Farah’s SSRN Author Page https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/cf_dev/AbsByAuth.cfm?per_id=629289
Paolo Davide Farah, Paolo Farah