Randolph E. Paul
| Randolph E. Paul | |
|---|---|
| Born |
August 8, 1890 Hackensack, New Jersey |
| Died | February 6, 1956 (aged 65) |
| Alma mater |
New York Law School Amherst College |
Randolph Evernghim Paul (1890–1956) was a lawyer specializing in tax law. He is credited as "an architect of the modern tax system."
Paul, the grandson of a butcher, was born in Hackensack, New Jersey on August 8, 1890 to Charles B. and Martha Evernghim Paul. He worked his way through Amherst College (Class of 1911), and received his law degree from New York Law School in 1913. He began his career as a switchboard operator and, later, as an insurance adjuster.
In 1918, Paul happened upon an advertisement placed by one George E. Holmes soliciting assistance in Holmes’ specialty practice in federal income tax law, a still novel concentration in the years just following adoption of the Sixteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution. Though lacking any background in the field, Paul answered the ad, got the job, and within two years had become a name partner in the firm.
Over the next twenty years, the firm's name underwent various changes: first Holmes, Paul and Havens; then Holmes, Lynn, Paul and Havens; then Olcott, Holmes, Glass, Paul and Havens; and finally Olcott, Paul and Havens. In 1938, Paul left his small firm to form the tax law department at one of New York’s oldest and then-largest firms, Lord, Day & Lord. By this time, Paul was a pioneer in establishing tax law as an integral component of a full-service Wall Street law firm. He was the author of the leading treatise on tax law in the United States (the six-volume Law of Federal Taxation with Jacob Mertens, and successive editions of Studies in Federal Taxation), and a visiting Sterling Professor of Law at Yale Law School.
In 1940, he was named a director of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, the first tax lawyer ever to occupy the position. Throughout the 1930s, Paul served as a part-time advisor to U.S. Secretary of Treasury Henry Morgenthau, Jr. Five days after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Paul finally accepted previously-declined entreaties to work full-time for the U.S. Treasury Department. First as special assistant to the Secretary for the Tax Division, and later as the Department’s General Counsel, Acting Secretary of the Treasury for Foreign Funds Control, and the Roosevelt Administration’s chief spokesperson on tax matters on Capitol Hill, Paul convinced Morgenthau to embrace Keynesian principles and to consider taxation as a vehicle for social progress.
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