Walter Hellerstein

Lessons of US Subnational Experience for EU CCCTB Iniative

I am extremely grateful for the opportunity to share with this most distinguished audience my thoughts on the lessons that the US subnational experience may have for the EU CCCTB initiative. My remarks are based on 35 years of writing about — and, more importantly, working in the trenches of — state tax practice in the US.

State Taxation and the Supreme Court

The Supreme Courts outpouring of significant state tax decisions in recent years has elicited little more than a yawn from most constitutional scholars. The nations preeminent law reviews, which once were filled with articles examining the Courts state tax opinions,I pay scant attention to them today. Leading constitutional law casebooks make only passing reference to state taxation. 2 Indeed, the Court itself has expressed ennui over the prospect of adjudicating a seemingly endless stream of state tax controversies.3 The lack of academic interest in the Courts state tax jurisprudence may be attributable to several factors. Matters of greater cosmic significance-abortion, affirmative action, and capital punishment, to name a few-may have crowded state tax questions off scholarly