Testing Alternative Legal Paradigms: An Experiment in Designing Tax Legislation

Abstract:     
This article reports on empirical research undertaken to test the proposition that citizens could be made certain of their legal obligations by changing the legal paradigm used to express those obligations. The claim, that employing a new legal paradigm would increase levels of certainty, was made in the context of a particular set of tax reform proposals. Our research tested a number of hypotheses involving different conceptions of the claim being made. We find that the alternative paradigm being presented was inferior to current practice and offer some reasons which would explain our results and the significance of this work for other areas of legal research.

Keywords: taxation, empirical legal research, certainty, legislative drafting

JEL Classifications: K34, H25, H26, G38, K22, K10, K34

Working Paper Series