Celebrating Our History: Peter Faber
5.8.2026
In honor of our 150th anniversary, we asked longtime, involved members for their recollections of the New York State Bar Association.
Peter Faber, past chair of the Tax Section, recollected using the Gettysburg Address to make a point about brevity and effectiveness while testifying before Congress in 1976.
“Congress was considering some major tax legislation that had millions of provisions in it. The Executive Committee and the Tax Section were invited to testify before a hearing before the Senate Finance Committee in Washington. The members of the Executive Committee felt very strongly that I should not testify about particular provisions of this proposed bill, but rather to testify about the need to simplify the tax law. Interestingly, we all made our living based on the complexity of the tax law, but we were advocating to simplify the law.
“I was preparing my testimony, and there was one sentence in the Internal Revenue Code that was incredibly long. I was trying to think of how I can illustrate how awful it is to have a sentence that’s several hundred words long. I was a history major at college, and I began to think, well, what in history is an example of something that’s concise and simple and eloquent? The Gettysburg Address.
“So, I counted up the words in the Gettysburg Address, and this single sentence in the Internal Revenue code was twice as long as the Gettysburg Address. It made quite an impact, testifying in that way.”
Do you have a special memory you want to share in honor of our 150th anniversary? Email rmelnitsky@nysba.org and your memory may be featured on our website.
