Nick Dimitrievski

Dimitrievski is a Senior Lecturer in Tax Law whose research centers on philanthropy and the income tax conditions governing civil society and entrepreneurial activity. His most recent monograph, Public Benefit as a Norm in Swedish Tax Law ("Allmännytta som norm i svensk skatterätt"), examines, among other things, the concept of public benefit and the Swedish tax-exemption regime for nonprofit associations under Chapter 7 of the Income Tax Act.

Dimtrievski has since published four peer-reviewed articles, each appearing in a different national or international scholarly journal and in one edited volume. Each article is a substantial, thoroughly developed contribution, and together they map out a broad and cross-disciplinary trajectory research. 

The field of tax law is strongly shaped by economic modes of reasoning rooted in economics and business administration. Advancing contemporary knowledge of the tax system requires the engagement of multiple academic disciplines and a shared commitment to the intellectual task. A unifying methodological thread running through Dimitrievski’s peer-reviewed work is an exploration of how legal scholars generally—and tax law scholars in particular—might approach that task.

Substantive tax law represents another core area of his scholarship. This is reflected in his ongoing work authoring commentaries to several chapters of the Income Tax Act, including Chapters 8, 9, 10, 11, and 67. These commentaries have been developed from the ground up. The work is not merely a new mapping of the structure of the income tax system; it also constitutes a concrete contribution to the public sphere. The commentaries form part of a knowledge infrastructure that provides interpretive guidance for Swedish businesses, courts, legislators, practitioners, public authorities, and civil-society organizations.

Dimitrievski has also published several edited volumes. He was appointed Sweden’s national rapporteur for the 2024 EATLP Congress on Taxation and Inequalities. (EATLP is a European academic association bringing together professors of tax law from universities across Europe.)

In addition to his own publications, he serves regularly as a peer reviewer for both national and international legal journals, including Skattenytt, Retfærd, and the Nordic Tax Journal. He is currently the Managing Director of Skattenytt, one of Sweden’s leading journals in the field of tax law, and serves as deputy scientific member of the Division for Other Research at the Swedish Ethical Review Authority (Etikprövningsmyndigheten).

Dimitrievski has been assistant supervisor for Gustav Stenseke Arup, who defended his dissertation in legal philosophy in 2021: A Study of the Entanglement of Wolves, Humans, and Law in the Landscape. He is assistant supervisor for Peter Lilliehs ongoing dissertation project on public procurement, which examines how requirements under the Public Procurement Act (2016:1145) together with accounting standards shape participation in public procurement processes. He is principal supervisor for Helena Fryklund’s dissertation project A Legal Study of the Power to Tax in Sweden and the EU.

He is currently working on a research project examining the taxation of below-market-value transfers from a philanthropic perspective.

Dimitrievski teaches and supervises across multiple levels of the university curriculum, working with a wide range of student groups. In addition to tax law at both the undergraduate and advanced levels, he teaches courses in discrimination law, corporate law, and jurisprudence. He is deeply committed to higher-education pedagogy and has developed his teaching practice over time, including through published work engaging with educational-philosophical questions in both instructional and supervisory contexts.

His teaching in tax law is grounded in a critically informed pedagogy that seeks to make visible, analyze, and question the social and economic norms embedded in tax legislation. More specifically, it is a pedagogical approach aimed at identifying asymmetries and boundary-drawing problems, and at illuminating how statutory structures, concepts, and legal criteria create differentiations among taxpayers and social groups. In the classroom, such a pedagogy inevitably involves moments of disruption or “knowledge crises”—instances in which something previously taken for granted becomes uncertain, established understandings shift, and space opens for new insight. Critical pedagogy in practice is always a dual movement: on the one hand, equipping students with the principled and substantive knowledge that tax law demands (descriptive teaching), and on the other, enabling them to understand, critique, and challenge the value-laden structure of the tax system (normative teaching).

As program director and director of studies, Dimitrievski has initiated and led the development of new academic programs within the university’s legal education portfolio, thereby advancing pedagogical innovation, collaboration, and shared engagement within the institution. In his role as program director for the Legal Science Program—the predecessor to the current law program at Karlstad University—he designed and developed a substantial portion of the program’s foundational law courses. During the program’s formative phase in 2012, his total course responsibility amounted to 67.5 ECTS credits.

Dimitrievski has organized doctoral-level courses in legal methodology (7.5 ECTS) with a focus on both tax law and public procurement law, with the overarching aim of strengthening doctoral candidates’ methodological capacities in ways that serve both their dissertation work and their scholarly development beyond the doctorate.

In close collaboration with tax advisory firms, Dimitrievski—acting in his role as researcher, teacher, and course director for the tax law course in the law program—takes an annual measure of the tax law profession.

Tax Career Development is a tailored seminar bringing together industry-specific expertise and KAU alumni, offering students and prospective employers an opportunity to meet within an academic setting. The seminar addresses questions concerning organizational culture in the tax profession and the characteristics of future employers. Students gain insight into how some of Sweden’s leading business and tax advisory firms work to attract law students in an increasingly competitive environment. Together with alumni specializing in tax law, discussions focus on the labor market and on motivational factors from both employer and employee perspectives.

Dimitrievski holds a Master of Laws degree from Lund University and spent several years employed at the Swedish Tax Agency in Gothenburg. He earned his Ph.D. in tax law in 2010 at the School of Business, Economics and Law at the University of Gothenburg.

Between 2010 and 2020, he played a central role in developing the legal education portfolio within the Department of Law (avdelningen för juridik). In his capacity as Director of Studies, he was part of the core team responsible for staffing, designing, quality-assuring, and launching the law program at the Business School of Karlstad University.

From the initial idea to the submission of a complete application to the Swedish Higher Education Authority (Universitetskanslerämbetet), the process of establishing the law program took approximately two years. The speed, quality, and execution of this application process remain without real precedent in Swedish legal higher education.