Taxation specialist Dr. Charles Delmotte is a new face on the MSU College of Law faculty this fall.
(Photo courtesy of Charles Delmotte)
NYU tax scholar joins MSU?College of Law faculty
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 says.
This fall, he will teach basic income tax, trusts and estates and the tax policy seminar at the College of Law – courses 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.”
He 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 says. “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.”
Hailing from Belgium, Delmotte earned his bachelor's and master’s degrees in philosophy, a JD, and a PhD from Ghent University. He 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 JD, 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 multinational clients and large firms and specialized in business recovery and insolvency both on a national and international level. He often advised multinational banks on dealing with (potentially) insolvent companies, and worked on the bankruptcy of the Sabena national airline, one of the biggest in Belgian history. He also practiced commercial law, such as litigations on issues of delivery and payment in commerce.
“Restructuring and bankruptcy border many other domains of law such as tax law, labor law, and commercial law – and this generates a good all-around legal training,” he says.
In 2014, Delmotte started a PhD that uses methods from philosophy, and later also economics, to investigate fundamental questions in tax design: what to tax (tax base), how to measure it (realization based or mark-to-market) and what rate and rate structure to apply (progressive or flat, exemptions or not).
During his PhD, 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 PhD, 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 explains.
“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,” he says.
Conversations and workshops with leading faculty led to new work on the economics of different tax and innovation policies. From 2018 to 2021, Delmotte published ten articles, notably in the Florida State University Law Review, the European Journal of Law and Economics, Social Philosophy and Policy, the Canadian Journal of Law and Jurisprudence and Constitutional Political Economy. 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.
“I’m a new Michigander! I already like the state as there are interesting cities such as Detroit and Grand Rapids and I will – after New York City – have more opportunities for outdoor activities,” he says.
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