16 - Cognitive Theory and Tax

Summary

Introduction

Overview

Legal academia has been overrun by a torrent of interdisciplinarism. Law and economics, philosophy, literature, feminist studies, sociology, history, and just about any other recognized discipline have become new fields, new approaches to gaining insight into law's meanings and possibilities. For the most part, this movement has been salutary. Its health is based on the simple fact that other disciplines are relevant to law – to what law is, to how it affects people and institutions, and to what it can and should be. But legal scholars must always be careful to use the new disciplines wisely. We must be sensitive to the particulars of the legal cases at hand, to the structure of the other discipline, and to the terms of the interaction. Interdisciplinary scholarship can as easily descend into superficiality as it can rise to perspicacity.

In the case of my chosen area of legal academia, taxation, the interdisciplinary contributions have been dominated by economists, who have made many invaluable contributions to the field. Philosophy and political science, which once had a good deal to say about matters of tax, have become less frequent but still important contributors. But other social sciences, such as psychology, have not been incorporated into the general tax academic's worldview. To be sure, there have been some moves to bring psychology into the study of tax, but these attempts have not been systematic and do not approach the growing level of attention paid to psychology in other legal fields, such as regulatory and environmental law.