PD Dr. Caroline Heber MTax (Sydney) has been awarded the Gustav Figdor Prize for Law by the Austrian Academy of Sciences for her habilitation thesis "Enhanced Cooperation and European Taxation".

The postdoctoral thesis deals with enhanced cooperation and European taxation, and focusses on key issues in tax law and European law. In particular, Caroline Heber explores the extent to which deepened integration between individual Member States grants the law of enhanced cooperation a privileged status – above the level of Member State legislation, if not quite at the level of generally binding directives and regulations. Such a privileged status particularly influences the admissibility of protecting successful harmonisation between participating Member States.

Caroline Heber wrote her habilitation thesis at the Max Planck Institute for Tax Law and Public Finance in the department of Prof. Dr. Dr. h.c. Wolfgang Schön. The habilitation procedure took place at the WU Vienna under the supervision of Prof. Dr. DDr. h.c. Michael Lang. The paper has been published by Oxford University Press in the Oxford Studies in European Law series under the title "Enhanced Cooperation and European Tax Law".

The Gustav Figdor Prize is awarded by the Austrian Academy of Sciences (ÖAW) for outstanding scholarly works in the fields of law, the social sciences and economics; every two years, papers from the legal sciences are honoured.

April 2022