Victor Rabinowitz, a leftist lawyer whose causes and clients over nearly three-quarters of a century ranged from labor unions to Black Panthers to Cuba to Dashiell Hammett to Dr. Benjamin Spock to his own daughter, died on Friday at his home in Manhattan. He was 96.
His son Peter announced the death.
For much of his career, Mr. Rabinowitz teamed up with the lawyer Leonard B. Boudin, who died in 1989, to defend clients like Julian Bond, Daniel Ellsberg, Paul Robeson, the Rev. Philip Berrigan, Rockwell Kent and Alger Hiss. The pair did not take the espionage case of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, only because they were already defending someone else accused of being a spy.
The two lawyers won the new revolutionary government of Cuba as a client over a poolside chess game with Che Guevara at Havana's Hotel Riviera in 1960, their law partner, Michael Krinsky, said in an interview yesterday. Guevara won, then gave them Cuba's business.
It quickly provided considerable work. The United States banned Cuban sugar imports, and Cuba retaliated by nationalizing American corporate holdings. This led Mr. Rabinowitz to defend Cuba's position in the case of Banco Nacional de Cuba v. Sabbatino before the United States Supreme Court in 1963.
Mr. Rabinowitz contended, among other things, that the Act of State doctrine applied, meaning that decisions of other countries about their internal affairs would not be questioned by American courts. In 1964, the court accepted his arguments.
In 1971, Mr. Rabinowitz defended Chile after the socialist government of Salvador Allende nationalized American copper companies. The litigation was pending when a military coup toppled Mr. Allende in 1973. Mr. Rabinowitz quit the case.
Victor Rabinowitz was born on July 2, 1911, in Brooklyn, where he grew up. His father was a committed socialist who became wealthy by inventing a machine to make hooks for bra straps. Victor graduated from the University of Michigan and its law school.
He began his legal career in 1938 at the New York law firm founded by Louis B. Boudin, a labor lawyer who was deeply involved in radical politics. In 1944, Mr. Rabinowitz started his own labor practice. Leonard Boudin, Louis's nephew, joined him three years later.
Mr. Rabinowitz represented unions on the left wing of the labor movement like the American Communications Association, which represented employees in the telephone, telegraph and broadcast industries. One of his tactics - rare then, but common now - was to buy a few shares of Western Telegraph, against which the union had recently staged a strike, so that he could hector top management at the company's 1946 annual meeting.
When a provision of the Taft-Hartley Act forced union leaders to swear under oath that they were not Communists, Mr. Rabinowitz sued, arguing that the oath was unconstitutional. But the Supreme Court ruled in 1950 that this abridgement of free speech was intended by Congress.
Soon, the firm's labor clients were being subpoenaed to testify before legislative committees in Washington and in the states about being suspected Communists. The firm eventually represented 225 labor leaders, teachers, librarians, professors and others accused of being Communists, including Mr. Hammett, author of "The Thin Man."
Mr. Rabinowitz was a member of the Communist Party from 1942 until the early 1960s, he wrote in his memoir, "Unrepentant Leftist" (1996). He said the party seemed the best vehicle to fight for social justice. Mr. Krinsky pointed out that Mr. Rabinowitz did not join the party until after the Soviet Union and the United States became World War II allies.
Early in his career, Mr. Rabinowitz was active in the American Labor Party, running for Congress on that party's ticket in 1947. He was a founding member of the National Lawyers Guild, which was formed in 1937 as an alternative to the conservative, racially segregated American Bar Association. After the guild began to fade, he became its president in 1967 and helped revive it by welcoming a new generation of leftists.
When Leonard Boudin's daughter, Kathy Boudin, a member of the Weather Underground radical political group, pleaded guilty in 1984 to murder for her involvement in the robbery of an armored truck, Mr. Krinsky said that Mr. Rabinowitz played "an important role in anchoring the defense."
Mr. Rabinowitz's own daughter, Joni, was convicted of perjury in federal court for her work with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee in 1963, after she denied being on a picket line in Albany, Ga. He won her release by persuading the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit to strike down the federal system for selecting grand jurors throughout the South because it under-represented the black population.
Mr. Rabinowitz was divorced from the former Marcia Goldberg in 1967, and his second wife, the former Joanne Grant, died in 2005. He is survived by two children from his first marriage, Peter Rabinowitz of Clinton, N.Y., and Joni Rabinowitz of Pittsburgh; two children from his second marriage, Mark Rabinowitz of Manhattan and Abby Rabinowitz of Hamburg, N.J.; his sister, Lucille Perlman of Manhattan; and two grandchildren.
For Mr. Rabinowitz, few issues escaped legal scrutiny. In 1989, the authorities in East Hampton, N.Y., where he long kept a summer house, cracked down on the display of a poster of an enormously fat naked woman. Mr. Rabinowitz decried the action as an infringement of constitutional rights.
"It is hard for me to see that poster as obscene," he told The New York Times. "On its face, it arguably has some scientific value, to encourage people not to eat so much. I see nothing in it to bring sex to mind."
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