Catherine Roraback, 87, a pioneering attorney who helped establish the right to contraceptives and privacy, died Wednesday, her family said. She was a longtime resident of Canaan, Conn.
In her most famous case, Griswold vs. Connecticut, Roraback won a 1965 ruling from the U.S. Supreme Court that established the right to contraceptives and privacy. Roraback also defended the Black Panthers in New Haven and civil rights workers in Mississippi.
Until this year, she reported to her law office in the Canaan practice that her grandfather, Alberto Roraback, founded in 1872.
Roraback was a graduate of Mount Holyoke College and Yale University Law School, where she was the only woman in her class.
Jan Wolkers, 81, a novelist, poet and sculptor whose sex-charged books helped shake off the shackles of postwar conservatism in the Netherlands, died Friday at his home on the North Sea island of Texel, his publisher said.
Wolkers’ best-known book was “Turkish Delight,” about a stormy relationship between a sculptor and his girlfriend who break up and are reunited shortly before she dies of a brain tumor. It was published in 1969 and has been translated into a dozen languages. In 1973, it was made into a film, directed by Paul Verhoeven and starring Rutger Hauer, that was nominated for an Oscar and voted Best Dutch Film of the 20th century.
Considered one of the four best postwar Dutch writers, Wolkers won but declined the country’s highest literary honors.
In the 1960s, his popular books included “Kort Amerikaans,” translated as “Crew Cut,” and “Terug naar Oegstgeest,” or “Back to Oegstgeest,” which also were made into films.
As a sculptor, Wolkers created Amsterdam’s Auschwitz Monument – a bed of shattered mirrors covered with glass in a small park. He also was a vocal opponent of the Vietnam War and the apartheid regime in South Africa.
