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70 Tax L. Rev. 179 (2016-2017)
George E. Zeitlin: Dear Friend, Colleague, and Mentor

handle is hein.journals/taxlr70 and id is 193 raw text is: George E. Zeitlin Dear Friend, Colleague, and Mentor LEO SCHMOLKA* So George is gone. As I think back over the last forty-seven years, his memory brings a host of adjectives to mind: gifted, creative, irre- pressible, blunt, ethical, ebullient, generous, flamboyant, funny, eccen- tric, intellectually restless, pragmatic and, although not an adjective, one hell of a tax lawyer. Despite all that, I know George was not perfect-no one is-but he surely was as I described him and, to boot, one of the nicest people I have known. I was George's partnership tax student in 1970 as I garnered my last credits required for my tax LL.M degree (part time). Those were the wild and woolly days in which partnership taxation more resembled Dodge City than subchapter K, to the great detriment of Treasury. The tax law almost always respected the partnership agreement: spe- cial allocations galore, no mandatory § 704(c), accounting-method and fiscal-year elections without restriction, primitive liability-sharing rules, you name it. In short, a game in which clever tax lawyers were always first and ten on the government's one-yard line. At the head of the class was George, among the cleverest tax law- yers of all. He was the fox that knew every inch of the woods and could forever send the government hounds off baying, wildly chasing the wrong spoor. George relished teaching us every trick in the book. It was an amazing experience. Of course, it all had a limited shelf life, because Congress gradually awakened from general anesthesia and ei- ther shut down or handcuffed the tricks George taught us. That, how- ever, not only does not detract from the amazingness of the course, but essentially vindicates its claim to amazingness. Some forty-odd years later, in his last two years of adjunct teaching, George was, in a sense, my partnership tax student. That calls for an explanation. After teaching Tax Procedure as an adjunct, seemingly forever, George decided to switch to Partnership Tax in 2011, but at that late stage, he did not want to undertake preparation for a course he had not taught in decades. He and I joined forces in teaching a new * Professor Emeritus, New York University School of Law. 179 Imaged with the permission of Tax Law Review of New York University School of Law

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