Dislocation refuted?

When professors Weber and Marres asked me to contribute to the Liber Amicorum of professor Wattel I of course was very happy and willing to prepare a contribution. There are a number of scholars whose academic work have been a source of inspiration for me and truly contributed to the development of my thinking, during the formative phase of my doctorate research for example and afterwards, and to this day. Wattel’s work is one of the significant examples and I feel honoured to be allowed to now contribute to the Liber.

Wattel's intellectual creativity and academic independence have been an inspiration. The same holds for Wattel’s search for a system, for consistency, in Terra/Wattel’s handbook ‘European Tax Law’ for example, and for years that is, not only in the current edition but in the earlier editions as well. A notable example of this, I think, is the line of thought in his book on the incomparability of domestic and cross-border scenarios, if and to the extent that the Member State concerned does not exercise tax jurisdiction in relation to the taxpayer’s foreign activities involved. And that line, very interesting, is now reflected in the recent Timac Agro-inspired Opinion of Advocate General Collins in W AG (Case C-538/20). And that line, also interesting, seems at odds with what we saw earlier in, for example, Bosal, Marks & Spencer, Lidl, Renneberg, Bevola and all those other cases where the Court judged domestic and cross-border scenarios to be comparable in such cases. Wattel’s underlying thinking here, I think, is that of the notion of ‘dislocation’, one of the concepts he developed and added to the discourse. It is this dislocation to which I would like to devote my contribution.