JAY A. RABINOWITZ, 74, JUSTICE WHO BACKED LEGAL MARIJUANA, DIES

Justice Jay Andrew Rabinowitz, who as a member of the Alaska Supreme Court
helped shape state law and was remembered mainly for pronouncing marijuana
legal, died on June 16 at a hospital in Seattle. He was 74 and lived in
Juneau and Fairbanks.

The cause was cancer, his family said.

Justice Rabinowitz joined the Alaska court in 1965 when the state was six
years old and its Constitution raw and untested. In his 32 years as a
justice, he wrote more than 1,200 opinions, many of which defined the legal
structure governing Alaska.

"We were fortunate to have him formulate the fundamental principles of
Alaska law, which will remain with us for perhaps the next 100 years," said
Charlie Cole, a former state attorney general.

His career in the law bridged Alaska's passage from a frontier territory to
statehood. He repeatedly served as chief justice, a rotating position, and
retired as a senior justice in 1997 upon reaching the mandatory retirement
age of 70.

In 1975 he entered the tangled legal history of marijuana use in the United
States with a 54-page landmark decision based on the right-to-privacy
section of the Alaska Constitution. The unanimous opinion he wrote in
effect legalized marijuana use in the privacy of one's home.

The state courts never reversed or modified that decision, which left it to
federal law enforcement agencies to enforce federal laws against marijuana
as a banned substance.

But the situation in Alaska remains as convoluted on marijuana use as it is
in the rest of the country.

The Alaska Legislature and a popular referendum later passed a ban. Yet,
Alaska, like eight other states, permits the use of marijuana as medicine
in certain cases. That exception, however, was at least temporarily blocked
by a unanimous United States Supreme Court last month.

Jay Rabinowitz was born in Philadelphia, grew up in the Riverdale section
of the Bronx and graduated from Syracuse University in 1949. He received
his law degree at Harvard University in 1953 and moved to Fairbanks five
years later. There he worked as a law clerk in federal court and as a
federal and state prosecutor before reaching the bench of Alaska Superior
Court in 1960.

He is survived by his wife of 44 years, Ann Nesbit Rabinowitz; three
daughters, Judith Bonorris of Larkspur, Calif., Mara Rabinowitz of
Anchorage, and Sarah Rabinowitz of Boston; a son, Max, of Albuquerque; a
brother, Robert, and sister, Judy Gerard, both of New York; and two grandsons.