Nick Dimitrievski

Nick Dimitrievski is a Senior Lecturer in Tax Law at Karlstad University, Sweden. His research focuses on the legal framework governing philanthropy, civil society, entrepreneurship, and income taxation, with a broader interest in the interaction between law, markets, and public regulation.

His involvement in designing, obtaining regulatory approval for, and quality-assuring the Law Programme at Karlstad University provided early first-hand experience of complex regulatory approval and governance processes. That experience has since developed into a broader research interest in regulation, institutional design, and the legal architecture governing modern markets.

By combining legal analysis with an interest in economics, taxation, and regulation, Dimitrievski's recent research increasingly examines how legislation, licensing procedures, and institutional frameworks shape business decision-making, market structures, and the role of the state. This perspective has, among other projects, informed his research on the regulation of the Swedish pharmacy market.

Tax law has traditionally been influenced by analytical models developed in economics and business administration. Dimitrievski's research proceeds from the view that many contemporary tax law questions require genuinely interdisciplinary inquiry, where legal scholarship engages constructively with neighbouring academic disciplines.

Dimitrievski has published five peer-reviewed articles in national and international academic journals, as well as a scholarly anthology. A recurring methodological theme throughout almoust all these publications is the question of how legal scholarship—and tax law scholarship in particular—can develop broader analytical frameworks capable of addressing increasingly complex regulatory problems that extend beyond the traditional boundaries of legal doctrine.

Substantive income tax law constitutes another central pillar of his scholarship. He is currently the author of comprehensive commentaries on Chapters 8, 9, 10, 11, 11a, and 67 of the Swedish Income Tax Act. Written entirely from first principles, these commentaries do more than systematically analyse the statutory framework. They also contribute to the legal infrastructure upon which courts, legislators, public authorities, legal practitioners, businesses, and civil society organisations rely when interpreting and applying Swedish tax law.

Dimitreivski has edited and contributed to several academic anthologies and served as Sweden's National Reporter to the 2024 Congress of the European Association of Tax Law Professors (EATLP), presenting the Swedish report on Taxation and Inequalities.

In addition to his own research, he serves regularly as a peer reviewer for both national and international legal journals, including Skattenytt, Retfærd, and the Nordic Tax Journal. He is the Chief executive Officer 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).

As a doctoral supervisor, Dimitrievski served as Assistant Supervisor to Gustav Stenseke Arup, who defended successfully his dissertation in legal philosophy in 2021: A Study of the Entanglement of Wolves, Humans, and Law in the Landscape. He has also served as Assistant Supervisor to Peter Lillieh, whose doctoral thesis Judicial Review and Contract Validity in Public Procurement: A Study of the Interaction between Public Procurement Law and Accounting Law (Överprövning av offentlig upphandling och giltigheten av avtal: En studie om upphandlingsrätt och redovisningsrättens inverkan i offentliga upphandlingar) was successfully defended in 2026. He also serves as Principal supervisor for Helena Fryklund’s doctoral project A Legal Study of the Power to Levy Taxes in Sweden and the European Union.

His current research examines the taxation of transfers below market-value from a philanthropic perspective, focusing on the interaction between tax law and charitable activity. 

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.