April 14, 1943 – July 3, 2012

Peter Shack, longtime Davis resident, lawyer in the California Attorney General’s Office and noted singer with the Davis Comic Opera and UC Davis Choir, died on July 3, 2012, after a long struggle with congestive heart failure brought on by radiation treatments for Hodgkin’s disease in the 1970s. He was 69.

Peter was born in Brooklyn, N.Y., on April 14, 1943, the son of Louis and Selma (Kunin) Shack and younger brother of Barbara (Berger), all of whom predeceased him. All of his grandparents had immigrated from the Vilnius area of Lithuania in the early 1900s. Moving to Teaneck, N.J., when he was 12, Peter attended and graduated from Columbia University (1964) and Georgetown Law School (1967). Accepted for the Foreign Service, he instead served as a Peace Corps volunteer in Guatemala, working with small credit cooperatives in rural Maya Indian areas. He also met his future wife, Kathryn Wetherell from Berkeley, a nutritionist working there on a research project for UC Davis. They were married at Cragmont Park in Berkeley in 1970.

After the Peace Corps, Peter worked several years in southern New Jersey as a rural legal assistance lawyer. While there, he became the co-defendant (he visited the farm with a New York Times reporter and photographer) in a landmark case overturning New Jersey’s trespass law so as to allow both an attorney and a health worker to visit a farm-worker client living on a private farm whose owner refused them admittance. The case, State v. Shack, holds that private property rights do not extend to exclude individuals proving access to government services for resident farm workers and has been the lead case in several property law casebooks.

Peter and Kathryn moved to California in 1972, where Peter passed the California Bar Exam. He took a position in the antitrust section of the California Attorney General’s Office in Los Angeles where he worked for 10 years. He was the section’s leading appellate advocate in cases such as State v. Levi Strauss, a class action settlement in which he succeeded in protecting the residue of unclaimed sums from the settlement to be used for a consumer trust fund.

In 1982, the Shacks moved to Davis, and Peter transferred to the Sacramento Attorney General’s Office where he worked in the charitable trusts section. He was responsible for that section’s legislative and regulatory programs and became a leading expert on nonprofit corporations. Among his work were the Buck case, protecting a $300 million bequest to a Marin County charity against competing claims, and also the case of a multimillionaire’s (one of the founders of DHL, the global mail service) bequest to UC, challenged by various children he allegedly fathered throughout the Pacific island area. Peter retired from the state in 2003, after which he became Of Counsel to the Manatt, Phelps & Phillips law firm up to his death.

Music was always central to Peter’s life. Besides playing the piano, harpsichord and recorder, Peter had a beautiful tenor voice that he used in productions of the Santa Monica Civic Opera, the Davis Comic Opera, the Sacramento Opera and the UC Davis Choir. He was a singer for 19 consecutive years in the annual Davis fundraising concert for Citizens Who Care of Yolo County.

Peter was a serious reader and knowledgeable baseball fan. He had recently converted to being a Giants fan, an unthinkable transgression for a Brooklyn native, but truly the only blemish on an otherwise exemplary character and life. His wife of 42 years, Kathryn, son Steven, niece Lori, grand-niece and grand-nephew Sarah and Benjamin, as well as his many friends, will miss him greatly — his decency and kindness, his sense of humor, his quiet intellect and, above all, his wonderful music.

In remembrance of Peter, please make donations to Citizens Who Care, 1017 Main St., Woodland, CA 95695.

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