Professor of Law appointed Queen’s Counsel

8 June 2016

Professor of Law appointed Queen’s Counsel

Victoria University of Wellington’s Faculty of Law is now home to four Queen’s Counsel.

Professor John Prebble is the latest Faculty member to be appointed to the prestigious rank in an announcement last night by Victoria alumnus and Attorney-General Christopher Finlayson QC.

JohnPrebble at deskProfessor Richard Boast QC, Professor Campbell McLachlan QC and Victoria Distinguished Fellow Sir Geoffrey Palmer QC are all based at Victoria’s Faculty of Law.

Appointments of Queen’s Counsel are made by the Governor-General, under the Royal Prerogative, on the recommendation of the Attorney-General, with the concurrence of the Chief Justice.

Pro Vice-Chancellor and Dean of Law Professor Mark Hickford is delighted that Professor Prebble has been recognised with this highly-regarded appointment. “The rank of Queen’s Counsel recognises those who have excelled at the highest level of law.

“Having three Queen’s Counsel as permanent members of Victoria’s Faculty of Law and one Distinguished Fellow highlights the strength of our academic staff and the contribution they make to both research and teaching.”

Professor Prebble is one of the world’s leading tax scholars with twelve books and 230 scholarly papers. He is only the third tax academic to be granted silk (appointed Queen’s Counsel) on the basis of his scholarly work, after Professor Vern Krishna of Ottawa (1989) and Professor John Tiley of Cambridge (2009).

As measured by the Social Science Research Network, his work is downloaded more often than any other New Zealand legal scholar and even though taxation is notoriously jurisdiction-specific, he is currently the world’s third-most downloaded scholar of taxation law, after two leading American writers.

Professor Prebble’s major work has centred on the revelation that the complexity of taxation law arises not fundamentally because governments use income tax to promote non-tax objectives or because of the innumerable forms that business transactions can take, but that being necessarily based on income, which is an economic rather than a legal concept, tax law is inherently unstable to the point of incoherence.

As well as teaching at Victoria, he is a Gastprofessor at the Vienna University of Economics, where he delivers an annual course to an international audience of doctoral students.

In 2014, concerned about the small number of Pasifika students graduating in law, Professor Prebble developed a scheme to offer volunteer lawyers as academic coaches to each first-year Pasifika law student.

He is a graduate of Auckland, Oxford and Cornell universities, where his doctoral work won the Guildford Prize for the best-written thesis in all disciplines. He was called to the bar in 1968, winning the Clearly Memorial Prize for the newly admitted barrister showing the most promise of service to and through the profession. He has won numerous other prizes, notably the Hill Medal of the Australasian Tax Teachers’ Association in 2007.

Professor Prebble was a member of two Tax Consultative Committees (1980s), the Committee of Experts (1990s) and the Tax Working Group (2009–2010). He has advised the Crown on a number of New Zealand’s largest tax cases, with total recoveries of billions of dollars.

After teaching at the University of Auckland in the 1970s, Professor Prebble moved to Victoria in 1981, where he has served as Dean of Law and was appointed professor in 1987. He has also been a member of the Victoria University Council.

In addition to teaching in Vienna, Professor Prebble has taught at other overseas universities, including Southern Methodist University (Dallas), the University of Sydney, Bond University (Gold Coast), University of Melbourne, and the Paris-Sorbonne University, with shorter engagements particularly in the Netherlands and China.

Professor Prebble is best known internationally for pioneering the sub-discipline of “Jurisprudential Perspectives of Taxation Law”, which is now established internationally. The practical importance of the study demonstrates the unusual nature of tax law reasoning and the constraints on reforming taxation law.

From 1992 to 2014 he was a member of the board of trustees of the International Bureau of Fiscal Documentation, Amsterdam, the world’s largest tax research institute, and is a member of the editorial boards of seven scholarly journals. He is general editor of the Thomson Reuters New Zealand Tax Library.

ends

© Scoop Media