Martha O'Brien
Professor Emerita
Martha O'Brien
| Martha O'Brien | Faculty of Law University of Victoria |
I joined the Faculty of Law in 2000. I spent the 16 years between graduating with my LLB from UVic as a law clerk at the Supreme Court of Canada (1984-85, McIntyre, J.), articling and in practice with McCarthy Tétrault in Vancouver (civil litigation 1985-90), as the Director of Research and Planning at the Law Society of British Columbia (1990-1991), as a graduate student at the Université libre de Bruxelles in EU law (1991-1992), and practicing tax law in Vancouver (1992-2000) with Lawson Lundell LLP, PwC and Blake, Cassels & Graydon LLP.
I taught three tax courses; the basic course and two advanced courses (corporations and shareholders, and international taxation), Business Associations, EU law, and Legal Ethics and Professionalism. I have been a visiting professor at the University of Nagoya (2010) and at Université Paris I – Sorbonne et Hautes Etudes Commerciales (2013). My research interests combine Canadian and international taxation with EU law, as well as international trade and investment law.
My research focus was on general anti-avoidance rules (GAAR) and the implications for interprovincial tax planning and the BEPS project, and on the CETA and EU-Canada taxation implications, in particular the free movement of capital guarantees.
- BA – UVic (1980)
- LLB – UVic (1984)
- LLM – Université Libre de Bruxelles (1992)
- "Direct taxation, tax treaties andinternational investment agreements: Mixed objectives, mixed results", (with Kim Brooks, Schulich School of Law, Dalhousie University) in de Mestral and Levesque (eds.) Improving International Investment Agreements: Negotiations, Substantive Obligations and Dispute Resolution, Routledge, New York, 2012.
- "Substantive Impact of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms on Income Taxation", Kofler, G., Maduro, M.,Pistone, P. (eds.), Taxation and Human Rights in Europe and the World, IBFD Publications, Amsterdam, 2011.
- National Report for Canada, in Lang, Pistone, Schuch and Staring (eds.) The Impact of the OECD and the UN Model Conventions on Bilateral Tax Treaties, Cambridge University Press, 2012 (with Catherine Brown, Faculty of Law, University of Calgary).
- "Taxation and the third country dimension of free movement of capital in EU law: the ECJ's rulings and the unresolved issues", [2008] 6 British Tax Review, 628-666.
- "Surrogatum, Source and Tsiaprailis: is there a principled basis for the tax treatment of replacement payments?" (2006), vol. 54 no. 4 Canadian Tax Journal 862-906.