Boris I. Bittker.

• Author: Graetz, Michael J.
• Position: Yale Law School professor - Testimonial

I first met Boris Bittker on January 21, 1977, in Miami. There are only a handful of people whom you remember first meeting. For me, Boris was one. For the past twenty or so years, I have been lucky enough to count him as a friend. He was always Boris to me, never Borie. I was a new friend--too much his junior to be so informal. Our phone would ring. "Mike, it's Borie," he would say. "Hello Boris!" I would respond.

The conference where Boris and I met was a gathering of about thirty tax law professors and public finance economists to discuss a paper by the conservative tax economist Norman Ture (whom I later learned Boris had known for more than thirty years from their Army days together). There were four formal commentators. Boris and I were the lawyers; Richard Musgrave and Martin Feldstein were the economists. I was young then and flattered to be included at the table alongside Boris Bittker, whom I knew only through his writing and his colossal reputation. Ture's paper attacked progressive taxation, all taxes on capital or capital income, and in particular, the double tax on corporate income--all issues that are still hotly debated today.

I began by observing that in our economy, people's earnings are often not due to their hard work nor necessarily well deserved, but rather are frequently simply due to the bad taste of the American public. I used the overwhelming success of an awful song called Muskrat Love by an especially untalented duo, The Captain and Tenille, to illustrate my point. But my comments fell flat. It soon became clear that I had stumbled onto the only room in America in January 1977 where no one had ever heard of the Captain, Tenille, or Muskrat Love. Even Boris Bittker was not a student of popular culture. The tax crowd is not a particularly worldly group. Boris's comments, on the other hand, were crystal clear to the audience. He began by noting that Ture's paper revealed that he was there representing Norman Ture, Inc. Boris then pointed out that Ture had not incorporated himself to obtain access to the world's capital markets. Here is what Boris said:

[A] biographical note informs us that Mr. Ture is a corporation,

evidently of the one-man variety. I mention this fact only because

it suggests that one of the points I would make about the corporate

income tax is already well known to Mr. Ture, namely that it can be an opportunity rather than a burden. In fact some of my best

friends approach it in the mood of a gourmet who dislikes swiss

cheese: discarding the solid matter to get at the holes. (1)

As everyone here knows, Boris Bittker was a pathbreaking scholar of federal tax law. His treatises on taxation cover the entire range of income and estate tax issues. They are found on the shelves of virtually every law and accounting firm in the nation. Boris was also a prolific author of law review articles, many of which had great impact on the key tax policy debates of the past five decades. Boris's scholarship was always sharp, insightful, and elegantly written. It frequently reveals his great sense of humor combined with just a little edge. Boris's work is filled with...