John K. McNulty

Professor John K. “Jack” McNulty, Roger Traynor Professor of Law Emeritus, died on September 26, 2020. He was a leading scholar of the law of taxation and an active member of the Berkeley Law faculty for 56 years.

Jack was born on October 13, 1934 in Buffalo, New York. He received his undergraduate degree in psychology, with high honors, from Swarthmore College, in 1956. He earned his LL.B. degree from the Yale Law School, graduating first in his class in 1959. While at Yale, he was an editor of the Yale Law Journal and studied under Professor Friedrich “Fritz” Kessler, one of the great twentieth century scholars of contracts and trade, who later taught at Berkeley Law as a visitor after his retirement from Yale. McNulty cited Kessler’s “artistry” in the classroom as a reason for his decision to become a law professor. After graduating from Yale, McNulty served as a law clerk to Hugo Black, Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States. Subsequently, he worked in private practice for Jones, Day, Cockley & Reavis, at its original home office in Cleveland, where he became a member of the Ohio bar—a membership he proudly maintained throughout his life—and the bar of the United States Supreme Court. In 1963, he decided to turn to teaching, and after a visiting professorship at the University of Texas School of Law, he joined the Berkeley faculty in 1964. He became the Roger J. Traynor Professor of Law in 1991 and took emeritus status in 2002.

It was not long after arriving in Berkeley that McNulty blossomed into one of the leading scholars of federal tax law of his generation. His scholarship ranged across the taxation field, from preferences for small business corporations to the treatment of gifts to large issues of tax policy. He was a staunch advocate of the integration of individual and corporate tax under a single framework where income is taxed only once; of removing the surtax on businesses that use the corporate form as opposed to sole proprietorships or partnerships; and of ensuring that stockholders were taxed progressively on corporate earnings, according to their personal circumstances. He also defended deductions for charitable contributions, which some criticized as giving wealthy philanthropists a needless tax break. Pushing back against a swelling academic consensus in the 1990s, McNulty championed a progressive income tax as preferable to a broad-based consumption tax. Perhaps most controversially, he suggested that gifts and bequests should be considered taxable income to donees, allowing the gift and estate taxes to be eliminated as no longer necessary.

Professor McNulty authored or co-authored seven books on domestic and international taxation, including one of the nation’s leading casebooks on the federal income tax (co-authored with his Berkeley Law colleague, Adrian Kragen). He also wrote 26 law-review articles on both personal and corporate taxation. His extensive work garnered numerous honors, such as a Life Membership in the American Law Institute and a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, which he received in 1977 to study foreign systems of taxation. He nurtured a love of travel in part through visiting professorships at his alma mater Yale Law School, as well as the University of Cambridge, the London School of Economics, and Leiden University in the Netherlands, among others. He also lectured around the world about the American system of individual and corporate taxation. In 1987, in a return to Cleveland, where he practiced law, Jack was appointed as the Norman A. Sugarman Public Lecturer in Taxation at Case Western Reserve University.

Jack also compiled an impressive record of service to the campus. He served as a member of the campus Committee on Academic Freedom for three years, from 1967-1970, including as its chair in his last year. He also repeatedly served on the Privilege and Tenure committee, from 1977-1980 and from 1997-1998; he chaired the committee in 1991-1992. He also served for two years on the Library Committee, from 2001-2003. Perhaps Jack’s most important service to the campus was his chairmanship of the Ad Hoc Committee for the Graduate Division Review of the Haas School of Business, in 1994-1995. In the last two decades of his life, after taking emeritus status, Jack continued his research on tax policy as a faculty associate of the Burch Center for Tax Policy.

Beyond campus, Jack was a man of widely varying interests, including photography, sailing, and music. He was a longtime member and avid fan of the San Francisco Opera, regularly attending black-tie openings. And, according to his obituary in the San Francisco Chronicle, he “collected fountain pens, enjoyed a good cocktail, and had an affection for hippos that became legendary among friends and family, who bestowed upon him dozens—and dozens—of stuffed, carved, sculpted, painted, and stitched hippopotami.”  After retirement, he continued to travel and visited Africa, Russia, India, and Egypt. But even in retirement, Professor McNulty remained a fixture at the law school and its myriad workshops and events. He was also a devoted member of the Women’s Faculty Club, where he dined nearly every day with a colleague, and the staff knew well how to make his special omelet and to save a piece of chocolate cake for him.

Professor McNulty is survived by his second wife, Babette Barton, the Adrian A. Kragen Professor of Law (Emerita), his two children John McNulty Jr. and Jennifer McNulty, and their spouses and his five grandchildren.

Andrew Bradt
2020