Victor Rabinowitz; Lawyer Won Cuban Case

Victor Rabinowitz, left, talks with his client Benjamin Spock and legal partner Leonard Boudin near the federal courthouse in Boston. Spock was on trial on charges of conspiring to counsel young men to evade the draft. (1968 Associated Press File Photo)

Victor Rabinowitz, 96, a New York labor lawyer who successfully argued a U.S. Supreme Court case defending the Cuban government's nationalization of U.S.-owned property, died Nov. 16 at his home in Manhattan. No cause of death was reported.

Mr. Rabinowitz's legal partner for decades was Leonard Boudin, who had a towering reputation as a civil liberties lawyer. In 1947, they formed a law practice credited with influencing constitutional and international law.

In 1960, Mr. Rabinowitz accepted the Cuban government as a client after the United States restricted sugar imports from Fidel Castro's regime.

The Supreme Court's 1964 decision in Banco Nacional de Cuba v. Sabbatino upheld the "act of state" doctrine, which said that U.S. courts should not question the internal affairs of countries unless international law was unambiguous.

Michael Ratner, president of the New York-based Center for Constitutional Rights, a nonprofit legal and educational group, said that the 1964 case "was a remarkable victory, considering American hostility to Cuba. It was a watershed case about when American courts can look into another case beyond its own borders."

Mr. Rabinowitz, whose father was a Lithuanian-born Jew, was born July 2, 1911, in Brooklyn, N.Y. He was a 1931 political science graduate of the University of Michigan and a 1934 graduate of its law school.

During the Depression, he joined a legal defense organization for communists and radicals and was politically impassioned by the Spanish Civil War.

In 1937, he was a founding member of the National Lawyers Guild, a racially integrated alternative to the American Bar Association. He was the guild's president from 1967 to 1970.

In a 1996 memoir, "Unrepentant Leftist," Mr. Rabinowitz said he had been a member of the American Communist Party from 1942 -- when the United States and the Soviet Union were wartime allies -- until the early 1960s, because it seemed the best way to fight for social justice. In 1947, he ran unsuccessfully as the American Labor Party candidate for an open U.S. House seat in Brooklyn.

That year, Mr. Rabinowitz went before the U.S. high court and unsuccessfully challenged the constitutionality of a legal provision that forced labor leaders to swear they were not communists.

After representing trade unionists in the 1940s, Mr. Rabinowitz and Boudin defended people accused of being political subversives in the 1950s and civil rights workers and Vietnam War dissenters in the 1960s and 1970s.

Mr. Rabinowitz once said he represented 225 witnesses before the House Un-American Activities Committee, many of whom were teachers and clerks caught up in the purge of suspected communists and sympathizers.

The high-profile clients of Mr. Rabinowitz and Boudin's law firm included author Dashiell Hammett, singer Paul Robeson, Pentagon Papers figure Daniel Ellsberg, civil rights leader Julian Bond and antiwar activists Benjamin Spock and the Rev. Philip Berrigan.

Mr. Rabinowitz helped represent Boudin's daughter Kathy, a member of the student radical group Weather Underground, who pleaded guilty to murder for her involvement in a 1981 armored truck heist. She served more than 20 years in prison.

Mr. Rabinowitz was the last attorney for Alger Hiss, the American diplomat accused of spying for the Soviet Union who was ultimately convicted of perjury in 1950 in one of the postwar era's most famous espionage cases.

Mr. Rabinowitz's marriage to Marcia Goldberg Rabinowitz ended in divorce. His second wife, journalist and activist Joanne Grant Rabinowitz, died in 2005.

Survivors include two children from his first marriage; two children from his second marriage; a sister; and two grandchildren.