The asymmetrical negotiation of legal certainty: neutral places in taxation law in France

Abstract This article argues that face-to-face professional events where regulators and regulated parties engage in civil and scholarly conversations about the law, such as conferences, seminars, and training sessions, are central to how regulations are interpreted and applied—an understudied aspect of regulatory capture. Critically revisiting Bourdieu and Boltanski’s notion of neutral place, we reconceptualize these events as places where dominant agents of a particular field come together to agree on unifying rules of competition—in the case of tax law that of legal certainty. Using data from semi-structured interviews, as well as statistical analysis and event observations in the field of tax law in France, we show how the structure of these events and the interactions among experts, in a contested move, shift the burden of predictability onto tax regulators, by expecting them to stabilize rule interpretation to leave room for private actors’ strategic uses of the law.