The Defeasibility of the Tax Rule

Abstract

The legislator has limited knowledge of the world and therefore the laws can not foresee all its applications nor all the results from its application. It will not be unusual in this sense for the applicator/interpreter of law to come up with situations where the law will produce patently unfair, absurd, immoral results and for which any reasonable being would realize that something other than law enforcement should be done. This article starts with an widely idea debated in Philosophy of Law on the last decades: the concept of defeasibility. It aims to verify the applicability of this concept to the Tax Law in Brazil. To do so, it will make brief considerations regarding the tax norm and the way the Brazilian tax doctrine conceives it. Also will be realized an introduction to the concept of defeasibility and a revision of the contemporary bibliography on the subject. After, having determined the concept and the comprehensiveness of the defeasibility, its application to the Tax Law in Brazil will be verified. In the end, it will be possible to conclude that the concept of defeasibility can be applied to the Tax Law and that this application allows the legal system to correct any injustices and absurdities deriving from the generality of the laws.