Rita Julien
Assistant Professor
Rita Julien is an Assistant Professor at the University of Houston Law Center, joining from NYU School of Law, where she was a Visiting Assistant Professor of Tax Law. At NYU, she taught Taxation of Property Transactions, focusing on the federal income tax implications of investment and business transactions, and Tax Policy, examining the intersections between taxation and sustainability.
Her research has focused on international taxation, including tax treaties, tax law in the European Union, and reform efforts addressing base erosion and profit shifting. She also researches efforts to achieve the UN Sustainable Development Goals, particularly the intersection of tax law and measures to counteract illicit financial flows. As part of the Global Tax Policy Center’s Tax Transparency and Corruption Project, in association with the World Bank, United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), and the African Tax Institute (ATI), she has worked extensively on Unexplained Wealth Order laws, studying the role of tax authorities and the parallels with certain tax investigation techniques.
She earned her doctoral degree in business law at WU, where she was awarded the 2020 European Doctoral Tax Thesis Award, jointly presented by the EATLP and the European Commission, as well as a Wolfgang Gassner Science Prize. She obtained an LL.M. in Taxation from Georgetown Law, where she was a Graduate Tax Scholar, and an LL.M. from the University of Luxembourg’s Faculty of Law, Economics, and Finance, specializing in European and International Tax Law. Previously, as a Teaching and Research Associate at WU’s Institute for Austrian and International Tax Law, she taught courses and seminars on topics such as dividends and interest under tax treaties, methods for the elimination of double taxation, and Austrian tax law. She continues to teach an annual course in the LL.M. program in International Tax Law in Vienna. In 2022, she was awarded the Thomas Bradbury Chetwood, S.J. Prize in Taxation from Georgetown Law.
Selected Publications
Tax Law as an Indirect Criminal Enforcement Mechanism: The Limits of the “Capone” Strategy and the Emergence of Unexplained Wealth Orders, 79 Tax Law Rev. __ (2025)(forthcoming)
Unexplained Wealth Orders: Toward a New Frontier in Asset Recovery (World Bank & UNODC StAR, 2023) (with Jean-Pierre Brun, Jeanne Hauch, Jeffrey Owens and Yoonhee Hur)
Credit Method Compatibility and Constraints under EU Law: An Analysis of the Case Law of the CJEU (Wolters Kluwer, 2022)
Taxing Crime: A Whole-of-Government Approach to Fighting Corruption, Money Laundering, and Tax Crimes (World Bank & UNODC StAR, 2022) (with Jean-Pierre Brun, Ana Cebreiro Gomez, Joy Waruguru Ndubai, Siddhesh Rao et al.)
Elimination of Double Taxation, in The UN Model Convention and its Relevance for the Global Tax Treaty Network 209 (Michael Lang et al., ed., IBFD, 2017)
COURSES:
Federal Income Taxation
Partnership Taxation
Energy Tax Law and Policy
