Clair qualified as a barrister in 2005 and went into practice in the corporate tax team at Allen & Overy LLP, subsequently practising at Farrer & Co LLP and finally at Stone King LLP. As a practitioner they advised on all aspects of UK direct and indirect tax, with a particular focus on complex corporate, financial and property transactions, international issues, charities, and disputes with HMRC. They left practice in 2018 to pursue an academic career, and completed a PhD on the political economy of international corporate tax reform in 2020. Alongside their practice and their research activities, they have collaborated with various NGOs and other civil society actors on a number of high-profile tax justice campaigns and policy initiatives.
Clair’s research interests include (i) tax avoidance (ii) the relationship between international corporate tax norms and global value chains, (iii) the state, capital, and the corporate form, and (iv) value theory in classical political economy and in contemporary Marxism.
Tax law and policy.
‘Unproductive labour and the smile curve’, Review of Radical Political Economics, 56(2), 247-266, 2024
‘Global production and the crisis of the tax state’, Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space, 56(8), 2196-2212, 2024
‘Gently down the stream: BEPS, value theory, and the allocation of profitability along global value chains’, World Tax Journal, 13(2), 163-216, 2021
‘Corporations, comity and the ‘revenue rule’: a jurisprudence of offshore’, London Review of International Law, 8(3), 399-424, 2020
‘Juridical ontologies of production and the Ricardian machine’, Accounting, Economics and Law: a Convivium, 14(1), 133-157, 2024
Acceptable levels of tax risk as a metric of corporate tax responsibility: theory, and a survey of practice’, Nordic Tax Journal, 2019(1), 1-15, 2019
‘Global inequality chains: integrating mechanisms of value distribution into analyses of global production’, Global Networks, 18(1), 33–56, 2018 (co-author with Liam Campling)
‘Risk-mining the public exchequer’, Journal of Tax Administration, 3(2), 22-35, 2017