Helle Dyrendahl Staven and Marte Mangset, Oslo University, Norway
When governments make difficult policy decisions, they often turn to experts. Experts are expected to provide knowledge rather than politics, facts rather than interests. Academic experts, in particular, are commonly associated with independence and impartiality. But what happens when the subject of expertise is itself deeply entangled with political and economic interests?
Tax law offers a particularly revealing case. Taxation sits at the intersection of state and market: governments want to secure tax revenues and enforce the rules, while businesses and individuals have strong interests in how those rules are designed and interpreted. Tax lawyers from public administration, private law firms, and universities all contribute to the production of tax knowledge. But can academics really occupy a neutral position between these competing interests?
Our recent article, Do impartial tax law experts exist? Legal academics’ restricted autonomy in a crowded field of experts (Vol 53, Issue 3, 2026) asks precisely this question. Drawing on interviews with 60 senior Norwegian tax law professionals, including all 12 tax law academics in Norway in 2022, as well as publications, seminars, observations, and policy documents, we examine whether academic tax lawyers constitute a distinct and autonomous group of experts.
A crowded field of experts
At first glance, academics might seem to have a privileged claim to impartiality compared with tax experts employed in ministries or private firms. Universities are formally autonomous institutions, and academic norms emphasise independence, peer review, and the pursuit of knowledge. Yet our research found surprisingly little that clearly separates tax law academics from other experts.
Take academic publishing and professional seminars. Norway’s main tax law journal is not an exclusively academic space: during the period studied, its articles were written almost equally by law firm lawyers, academics, and public-sector jurists. Practitioners also contribute to authoritative university textbooks. Surely, academics are respected participants in professional seminars, but they are only one expert group among several. Law firm lawyers and senior public officials are also presented as authoritative experts, with status deriving not simply from academic affiliation but from position within the wider professional hierarchy.
Perhaps most interestingly, academics themselves do not draw particularly sharp boundaries around their expertise. They often emphasise the practical and societal relevance of tax law rather than insisting on being holders of a distinctively theoretical type of knowledge. Their main distinction from practitioners is instead a claim to neutrality: they see themselves as less tied to either state or market interests.
Furthermore, Norwegian tax law academics do not occupy a neatly separate institutional or professional space. Universities struggle to recruit and retain tax law specialists and research funding has often been provided by state and private-sector actors with specific expectations.
These findings raise a puzzle. If academics do not have particularly distinct practices or arenas, do not view their expertise as distinct from or superior to that of other expert groups, and the institutional infrastructure does not support the production of autonomous academic tax law expertise, can they even be considered autonomous and impartial experts?
The exit tax as a case of impartiality
The Norwegian debate over the exit tax provides a useful case for examining this question. Following a wave of wealthy Norwegians moving abroad in autumn 2022, the government proposed tightening the rules. More than 80 wealthy Norwegians had moved abroad over a two-and-a-half-year period, taking substantial taxable wealth with them. The 2024 proposal required payment of exit tax within 12 years, regardless of whether gains had been realised. This significantly tightened the previous rules, under which the tax liability could lapse after five years if gains remained unrealised.
The consultation process revealed a strong institutional divide. The Tax Administration broadly supported the government’s proposal, emphasising enforceability, compliance, and administrative efficiency. Private law firms, by contrast, generally raised concerns about legal principles and the potential effects of stricter rules on investment, entrepreneurship, and economic activity. These positions reflect the institutional settings in which different experts practice.
Did the academics’ advice reflect any systematic bias?
Here, the picture was much less straightforward. Only two of Norway’s tax law academics commented directly on the proposed tightening, and their positions diverged. Across consultation responses, media appearances and editorials, academic contributions ranged from support for the direction of reform to criticism on legal and economic grounds, while some sought to balance the competing considerations without taking a clear position.
So, academics were neither simply representatives for the state, nor of market interests. They provided arguments that could support different sides of the debate, which suggest how they, as a group, operate with greater autonomy than practitioners.
The social production of impartiality
Our findings challenge the idea that academic authority depends on clear boundaries between academics and other expert groups. Academics’ do not derive their authority from being separate from the state and market. Instead, their position between these interests gives them a particular form of authority: they can act as relatively neutral arbiters without consistently aligning with either side.
This position is relational. Both state and market actors have an interest in maintaining academics as a distinct category of neutral expert. The state can gain credibility for policy decisions by invoking independent academic expertise; market actors can use academics to lend legitimacy to regulatory arrangements and mediate conflicts. Academic impartiality is therefore not simply a quality that academics possess. It is a position that other actors help to produce and sustain.
This suggests that academic autonomy should not be understood only in terms of independence from external interests. It can also be granted and maintained through relationships with those interests. That makes it a bounded autonomy: academics have room to act independently precisely because their perceived impartiality is valuable to others.
The broader implication extends beyond tax law. Rather than asking only whether experts are independent enough to be trusted, we should also ask how their independence is produced and whose interests it serves. Expertise is not simply knowledge applied to politics. It is a social relationship through which some actors come to be recognised as authoritative and impartial.