Passings

Finally, Amy Goodman (Democracy Now!) noted today, "And the civil rights attorney Victor Rabinowitz has died at the age of 96. In 1937 he helped found the National Lawyers Guild. He was a longtime law partner with Leonard Boudin." Rabinowitz wife, Joanne Grant Rabinowitz, passed away two years ago (January 2005). In his Unrepentant Leftist: A Lawyer's Memoir, Rabinowitz listed his contribution to preserving the NLG as one of the things he was proudest of in his professional life. In addition to being a founder, he was also president of the NLG from 1967-1970. With Joanne Grant Rabinowitz (married 1967 until her death in 2005), he had two children: Mark and Abby; and he had two children from his first marriage: Peter and Joni. Among Rabinowitz' many professional accomplishments were his work with war resisters during Vietnam, his lifelong advocacy of the Constitution (even when administrations and Congress seemed estranged from the Bill of Rights) and forcing professional cocktail circuit embellisher Hendrik Hertzberg to issue what we'll term a "corrective" to a 1985 smear against the NLG. In addition to the many cases he argued himself and with partners, Rabinowitz also filed amicus curiae briefs on cases, such as New York Times Co. v. United States, where he was not counsel but the issues involved were too important to stand on the sidelines.