Let us count the ways: a tribute to Boris Bittker.

• Author: Simon, John G.
• Position: Testimonial

How do we remember Boris? Let us count the ways. What is salient for some hundreds or thousands is the memory of his inspired teaching, a memory I share from his tax classes fifty-four years ago, including the humor: "I am, at heart," he said, "a ham." An even larger audience stands in awe (as I do) of the monumental written output that made Boris the First Lord of American tax scholars. Here, let us count other ways, other Bittker virtues, crudely summed up under the headings of independence and citizenship.

An instinct for independence prompted Boris to operate ahead of the curve in his choice of topics for special attention. For example, he was the first scholar seriously and sequentially to address the federal and state tax treatment of the "third sector"--the terrain of philanthropy and nonprofit organizations. His eight articles in this field included a 1969 essay providing the first thoroughgoing defense of the exemption of churches from federal, state, and local taxation. (1) He continued with an article questioning the effort to "constitutionalize" the Internal Revenue Code by importing civil rights standards into the governance of social clubs; he wrote that "the rights of free association and privacy cannot be reserved for the noblest among us." (2) Another essay represented the first comprehensive effort to explain tax exemption for nonprofit groups as something other than a government "subsidy," (3) and a year later he presented the first serious scholarly critique of the regulatory regime imposed on charitable foundations by the 1969 Tax Reform Act. (4)

Outside of the tax area Boris was also ahead of the curve. He saw, before most of us, what the quest for racial integration, which he shared, might one day bring about in terms of governmental land use policy and the problems that could generate. The result was his 1962 article, The Case of the CheckerBoard Ordinance: An Experiment in Race Relations. (5) Soon after James Forman delivered the "Black Manifesto" in New York's Riverside Church, demanding reparations for slavery and segregation, (6) Boris provided the first full-scale analysis of this issue, in a 1973 book, The Case for Black Reparations. (7) Boris soon regretted the title, which was chosen by his publisher, for his book did not, as some assumed, conclude that the case was a clear one--that reparations should now be paid. Instead, he offered a sympathetic but searching examination of that case, an exploration of...