Kathryn James

Associate Professor Kathryn James serves as an Associate Professor in taxation law and policy at the Melbourne Law School, University of Melbourne. She holds a PhD from Monash University, awarded in 2013. Her research specializes in taxation law and policy, with particular expertise in the value-added tax (VAT) or goods and services tax (GST). James investigates how ostensibly technical questions of taxation influence distributive justice, tax justice, and inequality. She is the founder and convenor of the Community Tax Project, an alliance between academia, the community, and welfare sectors aimed at advocating for tax reforms that support social justice. Additionally, she is affiliated with the Melbourne Centre for Commercial Law, where she acts as Associate Director for the Taxation Law and Policy research program.

James authored the seminal book The Rise of the Value-Added Tax (Cambridge University Press, 2015), providing the first comprehensive and critical account of the VAT's global emergence, informed by interdisciplinary perspectives from law, politics, history, and economics. She has published extensively in prestigious journals such as the Federal Law Review, UNSW Law Journal, Theoretical Inquiries in Law, and British Tax Review, as well as in volumes from Oxford University Press and Hart Publishing on tax law and distributive justice. From December 2019 to December 2024, she holds an Australian Research Council (ARC) Discovery Early Career Researcher Award (DECRA) fellowship (project DE190100346), exploring whether Australia can and should reform the GST, building on her established expertise in VAT/GST. Her scholarship, cited over 330 times on Google Scholar, underscores her impact in the fields of tax policy, GST/VAT, and distributive justice.

Professional Email: kathryn.james@unimelb.edu.au