We are delighted to announce that Dr Johanna Stark has been appointed as Professor of Taxation Law at St Hugh’s and the Faculty of Law at Oxford University. Dr Stark, who is currently Senior Research Fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Tax Law and Public Finance, will take up her new role on 1 October 2026.
Following her award-winning PhD on philosophical issues of regulatory competition, published as a monograph titled Law for Sale (OUP 2019), Dr Stark qualified for German legal practice at the Higher Regional Court of Munich in 2017. Subsequently, she joined the Max Planck Institute and taught as a lecturer at Ludwig-Maximilians-University Munich. She successfully completed her habilitation in the summer of 2024 with a monograph on error of law in (German) private law, and obtained venia legendi in Civil Law, Corporate Law, Tax Law, and Jurisprudence.
Dr Stark’s impactful research – spanning topics from private law theory to European business regulation to international tax justice – has received numerous prizes and awards, including the recognition of her dissertation as one of the ‘Law Books of the Year’ (2019), the Otto Schmidt Prize for the Europeanization and Internationalization of Law (2020), and the Therese von Bayern Prize (2023).
In her new role at Oxford, Dr Stark will continue with her research on tax law and policy, with an emphasis on the intersection between tax and business law as well as the philosophical underpinnings of both fields. She will remain connected to the Max Planck Institute as a research affiliate.
Dr Stark said: “I am delighted to be joining the Faculty of Law and St Hugh’s College as Professor of Taxation Law. Oxford is a wonderful place to do legal research, and I am very much looking forward to becoming a member of the Tax Law Research Group. My research explores the philosophical underpinnings of tax and business law, and specifically how taxation functions as a governance instrument driven by regulatory objectives beyond raising revenue. I feel enormously privileged to be joining a scholarly community that, with its wide range of expertise, provides the perfect environment for an interdisciplinary research programme. Besides engaging with my outstanding tax colleagues, I particularly look forward to building bridges to the business law community.”
