By Sheila Pursglove
Legal News
To Dr. Charles Delmotte, a new assistant professor at Michigan State University, teaching is the best possible job, on many different levels.
“The vocation to explain tax rules and interact with students is one of the reasons I pursued an academic career,” he said.
This fall, Delmotte will teach basic income tax, trusts and estates and the tax policy seminar at the College of Law — courses that, he feels, “allow you to make a difference in students' lives — for instance by sparking a passion for income tax or by explaining specific tax rules in a way that generates research questions.”
Delmotte is excited to get started in his new role.
“I will realize my dream to be a tax professor, and I can't wait to lead a classroom and teach tax courses,” he said. “Our task is not only to transfer knowledge but to create an environment that can help students overcome the consequences of inequality and discrimination and that can lead to vertical social mobility.
“In this sense, teaching can be a way to make a difference in society.” Delmotte hopes to make a difference in the larger sense, too.
“MSU is part of the U.S. News list of best tax law programs — and I hope to contribute to the rising star of our tax program,” he said. “In general, I’m excited to research and publish extensively, in the hope I can contribute to the position of our law school. My prognosis is that we will make a jump in the years to come!”
Hailing from Belgium, Delmotte earned his bachelor's and master’s degrees in philosophy, as well as a J.D. and a Ph.D. from Ghent University.
“Philosophers are interested in phenomena that are currently not fully understood by the social or natural sciences. What is beautiful — aesthetics — what is just or what is ethical — moral philosophy — aren’t questions we’ve fully solved,” he said.
His interest in political thought soon followed.
“When I was 16 years old my favorite philosophical question revolved around the legitimate exercise of political authority, political philosophy — when and why does society have a right to force another person to do — or not to do — X? This general question has many applications — when and why does society have a right to prevent a person from migrating into a country? When and why does society have a right to force a person to keep a fetus and give birth? When and why.
Delmotte says he quickly realized theories on the justification of coercive action are best met with an understanding of the legal system in place.
“If you want to critically engage with legal rules and the exercise of political authority — one must, I think, understand how the legal rules actually work,” he said. “And so, I went to law school.”
Delmotte’s critical approach to law wasn’t shared by many of his fellow students nor professors back in Europe. One professor told him, “Law is above everything a technical matter — and as lawyers, we should focus on how rules work, not on how they should work.”
“I followed this credo and, as a J.D. student, made sure I properly understood law ‘as it is,’” he said.
Delmotte was drawn to the niches of tax law, commercial law, and bankruptcy.
“Tax law is both highly complex — meaning it takes a lawyers’ mindset to properly understand the intricate interplay of all rules. At the same time, tax law is society's current answer to ‘who should pay how much and on what grounds’ — also a political and even philosophical question,” he notes.
“I'm trained to understand how tax law works in practice, but I also have a methodology to ask innovative research questions, for instance on whether the mark-to-market approach interferes with individual autonomy.”
After earning his law degree, Delmotte practiced business, commercial, and insolvency law as a member of the restructuring team at DLA Piper's Brussels office. For two years, he conducted litigation and provided legal counseling for multi-national clients and large firms and specialized in business recovery and insolvency both on a national and international level.
In 2014, Delmotte started a Ph.D. that uses methods from philosophy, and later also economics, to investigate fundamental questions in tax design.
During his doctoral studies, he was invited to contribute to Oxford University Press’ Philosophical Foundations of Tax Law — the first major book on this issue.
In the middle of his Ph.D., he became an Adam Smith fellow at George Mason University in Virginia; and for two years he studied political economy.
“This field focuses on how the design of legal rules is subject to pressures from self-interested voters, politicians, and lobby groups; and also, how legal rules result in unintended consequences, effects that the policymaker did not foresee nor intended,” he explained.
“Whereas earlier I focused on philosophical questions on tax, I became more interested in feasibility questions — for example the informational and incentive problems that tax policy makers will encounter when trying to make tax law.”
The combination of normative questions and feasibility insights triggered the interest of NYU’s Law School, and he was offered a post-doctoral fellowship at the Classical Liberal Institute.
“Suddenly all the pieces of the research puzzle fit together,” Delmotte said.
Conversations and workshops with leading faculty led to new work on the economics of different tax and innovation policies. From 2018-21, Delmotte published 10 articles.
His research also benefited from working with co-authors from other disciplines, including economists and political scientists.
Delmotte, who also has lived in New York City, London (King’s College), Munich (Max Planck) and in Tucson when he was a visiting researcher at the University of Arizona, now makes his home in East Lansing.
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