NOVA Tax Research Lab is a knowledge centre established in the CEDIS – Research & Development Centre on Law and Society, the Research Unit of NOVA School of Law, Universidade NOVA de Lisboa. CEDIS is funded by FCT, I.P. (Foundation for Science and Technology, Public Institute), through national funds from the Portuguese Ministry of Science, Technology and Higher Education, under projects UIDB/00714/2020 and UIDP/00714/2020.
It stemmed from the need for academic reflection and intervention on the ongoing (re)evolution of the tax systems and on the new challenges imposed on tax administrations and taxpayers.
It is aimed to bring taxation topics closer to the community, design impactful training, and promote innovative and multidisciplinary research on national and international issues related to taxation. You can find our by-laws here (in Portuguese).
mission
NOVA Tax Research Lab’s mission is to promote research and activities concerned with the latest challenges of taxation from Portuguese, European and International perspectives.
In addition to developing research, publications and other technical analysis, NOVA Tax Research Lab also designs training and workshops and organizes conferences and talks.
NOVA Tax Research Lab aims to be the bridge between the academy, private and public sectors, as well as civil society, for a coherent discussion of tax challenges.
Goals
Promote community awareness on the importance and impact of taxation.
Promote collaborative research in tax law and create tax knowledge
Develop a multinational and multigenerational network of tax researchers.
meet our team
Tax Lab Director
Rita Calçada Pires
Director's words
Creating a Tax Research Lab has long been a dream of mine. Not to increase the number of centres in my faculty, nor much less to compete with other research centres.
I have always felt the need to imbue tax research with a centrally humanist signature, capable of going beyond the complexities and natural antagonisms inherent to the legal tax relationship. I feel the need to somehow strengthen the research approach, deeply integrating the various scientific areas underlying taxation. Being ours a legal approach, it does not abandon the recognition of many other impacts, absorbing them, assuming them and working with them.
The NOVA Tax Research Lab, affectionately nicknamed NOVA Tax Lab, is born aiming to generate value in tax knowledge. It aspires to become an example of how taxation can and should be researched. We do not anchore ourselves to the national domain, we assume a global approach and offer our lenses to the analysis and reflection about what exists and what can and should exist in the universe of taxation. We are not afraid of trial and error, as we are not troubled with attempting creation of alternative solutions for taxation. Even if they seem futuristic, naïve or impracticable. We follow Victor Hugo’s belief, “There is nothing like dream to create the future. Utopia today, flesh and blood tomorrow.”
We begin with small, but consistent steps. We will not do more than what the accuracy and the objectivity of what creates value will allow us to do. This is the only way to perceive our research. In all this process we wish to communicate, with academia, with society with political and economic agents. We desire creating networks of knowledge and reflection to better and more actively propose valid and alternative paths to think, interpret and apply Tax Law.