Tribute to Frans Vanistendael: a personal journey through his writings

Abstract

Frans Vanistendael (1942–2021) was a visionary tax academic. A tireless traveler of European and world universities, he had developed throughout his career a communicating enthusiasm for the Europeanisation of taxation. Combining an indisputable technical competence with an extraordinary capacity for abstraction, he was a university person in the etymological sense of the term, i.e. oriented towards the universal, while at the same time deeply embedded in the political, social and economic reality of his time.