By Gwyneth K. Shaw
“Berkeley Law Voices Carry,” hosted by Gwyneth Shaw, is a podcast about how the school’s faculty, students, and staff are making an impact — in California, across the country, and around the world — through pathbreaking scholarship, hands-on legal training, and advocacy.
This episode features Berkeley Law Professor Brian Galle, who’s just released a new book, How to Tax the Ultrarich(opens in a new tab), outlining a plan for fairer taxation at the federal level.
In the United States, the top 0.1 percent — about 340,000 people — now hold $1 in every $6 of private wealth, or roughly $23 trillion. In the book, published by the Roosevelt Institute, Galle proposes reforms to make the super wealthy pay taxes on the growth of their fortunes, with methods he argues could avoid being struck down by the U.S. Supreme Court.
Galle is also involved in efforts to put a tax on billionaires on the ballot in California in November.
He joined the Berkeley Law faculty in 2025 after a decade at Georgetown Law; he also taught at Boston College and Florida State. Galle holds a J.D. from Columbia and an LL.M. in taxation from Georgetown. In 2022 and 2023, he served as a senior fellow at the Securities & Exchange Commission, helping to draft and strategize major rulemaking for the commission. Before becoming a professor, he was a federal prosecutor in the Criminal Appeals and Tax Enforcement Policy Section at the Tax Division of the U.S. Department of Justice.
Galle teaches in the fields of federal income taxation and corporate tax law and policy.
What follows is an edited version of the conversation. Listen to the full episode below and visit the “Voices Carry” archive for all episodes.
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