and testified in Congress about the impact of racism on tax law. Dean's work forced President Biden to change course on tax havens and forced the leading international tax policymaking organization to withdraw a major marketing brochure. He led the world's foremost graduate tax law program at NYU and practiced tax with leading global law firms. Dean earned his law degree from Yale. His books include For-Profit Philanthropy (2023), Social Enterprise Law: A Multijurisdictional Comparative Review (2023), and Social Enterprise Law: Trust, Public Benefit, and Capital Markets (2017).
Dean applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Racial Capitalism and International Tax Law: The Story of Global Jim Crow, and reported the following:
On page 99, I describe how the 2000 US presidential election shaped the fate of the OECD’s effort to blacklist tax havens. The change in Treasury leadership—from Lawrence Summers, Clinton’s secretary and the OECD initiative’s strongest supporter, to Paul O’Neill, Bush’s pick and one of its fiercest critics—proved decisive. Personnel shifts like this can make the difference between momentum and collapse in global tax diplomacy.Learn more about Racial Capitalism and International Tax Law at the Oxford University Press website.
The page also considers the role of right-wing think tanks, especially the Center for Freedom and Prosperity (CFP), which mobilized opposition to the OECD plan. Even if the CFP exaggerated its influence, it managed to forge improbable alliances, linking the Heritage Foundation with members of the Congressional Black Caucus. The section closes by speculating how different things might have looked had Al Gore won in 2000—a reminder that international tax law is never just about taxes but about politics, power, and identity.
Does the Page 99 Test work?
Yes—almost eerily well. A browser landing on this page would immediately see the book’s central themes at work: how domestic political battles in the United States shape global tax policy, how right-wing institutions exert surprising influence, and how questions of race and identity are never far from the surface.
Page 99 captures the larger argument of the book: international tax law cannot be understood without grappling with racial capitalism. The Clinton-to-Bush transition, the replacement of Summers with O’Neill, and the lobbying of groups like the CFP all illustrate how seemingly technical tax rules are embedded in struggles over legitimacy, sovereignty, and belonging.
This single page shows both the drama of individual political actors and the deeper structural forces at play. That’s what the book does throughout: reveal how international tax law reflects and reinforces racialized hierarchies, while also tracing the moments of resistance—from small states labeled “havens” to dissenting voices within US politics—that sometimes push back against those hierarchies.
In short, if you opened the book to page 99, you would get a very good sense of what the book is about.
--Marshal Zeringue
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