My research and teaching areas are centred on public finance law and policy in the widest possible contexts. I am interested in: tax law and policy (especially corporate tax and commercial tax law and policy); international aspects of corporate and commercial tax law; the practice of tax law; the history of tax law ideas and tax philosophies more generally (especially in the context of the European Enlightenment and the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries); the relationship between property law and public finance law; the law relating to public debt and deficit; and legal aspects of the fiscal relations between treaty organisations, governments and corporate groups, both in the context of the European Union and globally.

My most recent published work has been a chapter on fiscal jurisdiction and 'political right', in 'The Dynamics of Taxation: Essays in Honour of Judith Freedman' published by Hart in October 2020. Before that (with Dr Dominic de Cogan, University of Cambridge), I edited and contributed to 'Landmark Cases in Revenue Law' which was published by Hart in January 2019. Prior to that, I worked on the analysis of shifting tax law and policy under the previous Conservative administration, as well as the implications of complexity in relation to tax law. I have also written about the philosophical history of tax law in the work of the Baron de Montesquieu and of David Hume.

I am currently completing the manuscript of a large-scale sole-authored treatise dealing with the taxation of multinational groups. This has been my research preoccupation in recent years, and it is intended to mark a significant contribution to tax law scholarship, both in terms of scope and of philosophical approach. Separately, I have continued the Enlightenment theme in two chapters (one co-written with Professor Rebecca Probert, University of Exeter) for 'A Cultural History of Law in the Age of Enlightenment', published by Bloomsbury in February 2019, and jointly edited by Professor Probert and myself. I have also contributed a chapter to 'A Cultural History of Law in the Age of Reform', again published by Bloomsbury in February 2019, and edited by Professor Ian Ward (University of Newcastle). My Enlightenment volume chapter is about Handel's 'Solomon', as a portrayal of the eighteenth-century constitution, while my Age of Reform chapter is about the constitution in Gilbert and Sullivan's 'Utopia, Limited'.

Some principal themes of my work are as follows: how ideas for tax reform are shaped by political calculation (a major theme of my 2011 book, 'The Political Economy of Corporation Tax' (Hart)); how political calculation both shapes, and is shaped by, legal considerations; the status of tax law as public law; the roles of thinkers such as Hugo Grotius, Montesquieu and Hume in helping to form the tax law philosophy of Adam Smith; how the ideas embraced and developed by Smith continue to shape tax law and policy in contemporary national, regional and international contexts; how public spending and future tax reform relate to visions of government, of the state and of state capacity in the wake of the pandemic.