Victor Rabinowitz

Victor Rabinowitz, (New York, July 2, 1911 - November 16, 2007) was an American lawyer, civil rights advocate and renowned left-wing figures.

He was born in New York City, the son of Lithuanian emigrants. He studied law at the University of Michigan and graduated in 1934.

He formed a legal study with Leonard Boudin. He assumed the defense of well-known personalities persecuted as "anti-American" since the beginning of McCarthyism.

Participated in the founding in 1937 of the National Lawyers Guild, a group of progressive lawyers whose stated objectives are to eliminate racism, safeguard the rights of workers, women, peasants and minorities, defend civil rights and to use law as a means of protecting people rather than suppressing it.

In 1950 he successfully challenged the Thaft-Hartley Act, consisting of federal laws restricting trade union activity and forcing union leaders to swear that "they were not communists."

Among the people he defended are actor Paul Robeson, lawyer Alger Hiss, former military man Daniel Ellsberg, accused of espionage, writer Dashiell Hammett, members of the Black Panthers and the Church of Scientology < / p>

At the beginning of the 1960s, he sponsored the interests of the State of Cuba before the US justice system, defending the nationalizations undertaken by the government of Fidel Castro, based his argument on the impossibility of US courts to review sovereign acts of Cuba, ultimately obtaining a favorable ruling by the Supreme Court. He also represented the defense of the government of Salvador Allende in 1971 when the Chilean government carried out the nationalization of copper.

During the Vietnam War he represented conscientious objectors and opponents of the war, including Benjamin Spock, public prosecutor of refusal to recruit.

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