Tax Lawyers of the World, Unite! Mitchell B. Carroll (1898–1987), Transnational Legal Networks and International Capital

Abstract

Using the career of US tax lawyer Mitchell B. Carroll (1898–1987), this article traces the emergence of a transnational professional milieu of ‘tax coders’ from the 1920s to the 1970s. Carroll's trajectory – from government assistant to corporate counsel, from the League of Nations Fiscal Committee to the long-serving presidency of the International Fiscal Association (IFA) – illustrates the porous boundaries between international fiscal diplomacy and business advocacy. Drawing on individual and collective biography as well as analyses of the IFA membership, this article argues that a persistent international tax architecture that favoured capital-exporting countries and failed to regulate corporate tax planning was actively sustained by an identifiable, socially cohesive network of lawyers, corporate counsels and business representatives who built, led and reproduced the expert infrastructure of international taxation across generations.