Document Type
Article
Publication Date
2006
Abstract
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.
Disciplines
Law | Legal Biography
Recommended Citation
Michael J. Graetz,
Boris I. Bittker,
115
Yale L. J.
739
(2006).
Available at:
https://scholarship.law.columbia.edu/faculty_scholarship/256