Boris I. Bittker, Sterling Professor of Law, 1946-83

Boris I. Bittker

REFERENCES:

Josh Duboff, “Law Scholar Bittker dies at age 88,” Yale Daily News, Sept. 15, 2005.

Interview with Prof. Boris I. Bittker, June 9, 1982, conducted by Prof. Elias Clark.

Laura Kalman, Legal Realism at Yale 1927-1960 (1986).

“YLS Mourns Death of Boris I. Bittker,” @YLS-News (Sept. 12, 2005).

Boris Bittker (1916-2005), YLS ’41, was a professor at the Law School for nearly six decades. He was the dominant tax scholar of his era, and a pioneer in turning the study of federal tax law into a serious academic discipline. Bittker’s early articles can be characterized as treating “technical” issues in the tax code, but the scope of his scholarship soon expanded to the major questions of tax policy, and his articles continue to shape academic discussion of tax law.

Bittker published several innovative casebooks, as well as treatises, updated versions of which are still in use today. Bittker’s Estate and Gift Taxation (1951), for instance, was one of the first casebooks on the subject and engaged the critical tax policy issue of wealth redistribution. In addition, his Federal Income Taxation (1954) was the first “completely new” text published after the comprehensive revision of the Internal Revenue Code in 1954, and like his earlier casebook, explicitly considered policy issues in contrast to most casebooks of the time.

One of the recurring themes of Bittker’s scholarship was the difficulty—and sometimes futility—of applying over-arching principles to the complex and multi-faceted tax code. For example, in “A ‘Comprehensive Tax Base’ as a Goal of Income Tax Reform,” 80 Harv. L. Rev. 925 (1967), Bittker maintained that it was impossible to establish a neutral “tax baseline” against which loopholes, preferences, and “tax expenditures” could be measured.

Bittker’s prolific scholarly output covered not only all of income and estate taxation, including the taxation of business enterprises, but also a variety of nontax subjects, including civil rights and constitutional law. In 1972 (reissued in 2003), he published The Case for Black Reparations, an important work in which he sought to establish the feasibility of providing reparations to African-Americans for the horrors of slavery. He retired from teaching in 1983, but continued to come in to his office at the Law School every day until close to his death.

Professor Bittker was interviewed in 1982, in a series of recorded interviews of faculty undertaken by the Law School.