Lawrence Robbins, an influential trial and appellate lawyer who argued 20 cases before the Supreme Court, prepared high-profile witnesses for their congressional testimonies and made his debut as a novelist last month, died on Nov. 2 in Manhattan. He was 72.
The cause was liver failure, his wife, Leslie Danoff, said.
In 2019, Marie Yovanovitch hired Mr. Robbins to guide her through a close-door deposition and interview with three House committees, and a public hearing before the House Intelligence Committee, during the first impeachment inquiry of President Donald J. Trump.
She had been dismissed as the ambassador to Ukraine on Mr. Trump’s orders and was devastated to learn that Mr. Trump told the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelensky, that she was “bad news” and warned that “she’s going to go through some things” in a phone call in July 2019.
“I cannot tell you how hopeless I was feeling,” Ms. Yovanovitch said in an interview. “And he was like the sword and the shield, which really gave me confidence to stand up for myself and my profession.”
She added, “He told me that I had to be a strong witness and stand on my own two feet and that unless something egregious happened he wasn’t going to jump in.”
A year earlier, Mr. Robbins prepared Christine Blasey Ford before she testified to the Senate Judiciary Committee that Brett Kavanaugh, who had been nominated to the Supreme Court by Mr. Trump, sexually assaulted her while they were in high school.
Dr. Ford recalled a session in which Mr. Robbins and his team had given her a list of dos and don’ts for her testimony.
“At one point, Larry leaned toward me across the table and gave me the best advice I could have received,” she wrote in “One Way Back: A Memoir” (2024). “‘Just remember, if you can walk in that door, you’ve already won.’ Something stirred in me, competitiveness editing out the dread for one blissful moment. ‘They don’t want you to even show up,’ he continued.”
In a career that toggled between government service and private practice, Mr. Robbins’s clients included I. Lewis Libby, known as Scooter, Vice President Dick Cheney’s chief of staff, who was convicted of perjury during a C.I.A. leak investigation; Theresa Squillacote, a former Pentagon lawyer who was accused of spying for East Germany; and Dr. William Hurwitz, a pain management doctor.
In 2006, Mr. Robbins successfully argued that an appeals court should overturn the conviction of Dr. Hurwitz, who had been sentenced to 25 years in prison for narcotics distribution for excessively providing opioid prescriptions to his patients.
In a retrial, Mr. Robbins, working with another lawyer, Richard Sauber, persuaded the judge that while Dr. Hurwitz had overprescribed drugs, he had done so in good faith for patients in serious pain. While questioning a former patient of Dr. Hurwitz, Mr. Robbins took her through her medical records and noted his regular examinations of her and the questionnaires he made her fill out about her pain. He asked her to compare Dr. Hurwitz with the street dealers who had supplied her with OxyContin.
“Did any of the people who sold you drugs and medication ever ask you about your pain?” Mr. Robbins asked.
“No,” the woman said.
The judge dismissed the most serious charges, and the jury convicted Dr. Hurwitz of 16 drug trafficking counts. He was sentenced to nearly five years in prison.
Mr. Sauber, who was recently special counsel to President Biden, said, “Larry was really extraordinary at being able to read a complicated, confusing, interminable trial transcript and pick out the two or three issues that he thought were appellate issues and carried through on having criminal convictions reversed.”
Lawrence Saul Robbins was born on Jan. 28, 1952, in Washington, and raised in Merrick, N.Y., on Long Island. His father, David, was an actuary, and his mother, Judith (Schnur) Robbins, was an elementary-school teacher.
He studied economics at Yale University (where he sang in an a cappella group, the Duke’s Men of Yale, and played piano in a rock band) and earned a bachelor’s degree in 1974. Four years later, he received his law degree from Harvard. At The Harvard Law Review, he edited the work of John G. Roberts Jr., the future chief justice of the United States.
He joined Kramer, Levin, Naftalis & Frankel as an associate in 1979 and worked in the federal government from 1983 to 1992 as assistant United States attorney in the Eastern District in Brooklyn, assistant to the solicitor general and prosecutor on the staff of the office of the independent counsel that investigated wrongdoing at the Department of Housing and Urban Development.
He returned to private practice at Mayer Brown; Robbins, Russell, Englert, Orseck, Untereiner & Sauber; and, in the last two years, Friedman Kaplan.
When the Covid-19 pandemic slowed down his law practice in 2020, Mr. Robbins turned to writing a novel, a long-held ambition.
“The idea was to see if he could write a novel, and maybe it would get published,” Ms. Danoff, his wife, said in an interview. “So Larry learned a lot about the process of writing a novel. He must have written 100 drafts.”
He drew on his legal background for “The President’s Lawyer,” a thriller about a powerful Washington lawyer, Rob Jacobson, the best friend of a former president, Jack Cutler. Jacobson agrees to defend Cutler when he is accused of killing a woman with whom he was having an affair.
In Jacobson’s voice, Mr. Robbins wrote: “When you’re the most important person in Jack’s life, your own life seems shinier, jazzier, sparkier. Jack was always quick to pick up the tab when we went out for lunch together, as we did on special occasions. But it wasn’t just largess that Jack doled out without breaking stride. Even though he was, by universal acclamation, Big Man on Campus, Jack always took an interest in what I was doing, and never intimated that my life was less fascinating than his. (Though it surely was.)”
In a review in The New York Times, Sarah Lyall wrote that Mr. Robbins “keeps the pace fast and the courtroom scenes convincing.”
Ms. Danoff said, “Thank goodness he lived long enough to see the Times review.”
In addition to his wife, Mr. Robbins is survived by his sons, Jeremy, Ethan and Noah; two granddaughters; and his brothers Philip and Michael.
Mr. Robbins said that long after he and other assistant U.S. attorneys were sworn in by I. Leo Glasser, a federal district judge, in 1983, he recalled the jurist’s words.
“It was a chance, he said, — no, a duty — to be on the right side of the law every day,” Mr. Robbins wrote in an application to be U.S. attorney for the Southern District. “Yes, we were law enforcement officers. But we were also the law’s guardians.”
He added: “Every time I appeared for the United States, I felt the force of Judge Glasser’s injunction.”
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