Marvin E. Frankel, 81; Ex-Judge Advanced Human Rights

Marvin E. Frankel, 81, a longtime human rights advocate and former federal judge who helped spur the establishment of federal sentencing guidelines, died of prostate cancer Sunday in New York.

Frankel, who was appointed to the U.S. District Court in Manhattan in 1965, co-wrote the influential book “Criminal Sentences, Law Without Order,” which made a case for creating federal sentencing guidelines and ending what Frankel called a highly subjective “nonsystem” of meting out sentences.

Frankel returned to private practice in 1978 until 1983, then became a civil rights crusader.

As chairman of the board of the Lawyers Committee for Human Rights, he traveled widely, criticizing the repression of Jews in the Soviet Union, the living conditions of political prisoners in Israel and apartheid in South Africa.

The New York City-born Frankel graduated from Columbia Law School in 1948 and argued his first case before the Supreme Court in 1952 as a member of the solicitor general’s office.

While teaching at Columbia University Law School in the 1960s, he helped constitutional scholar Herbert Wechsler draft the brief for the New York Times in the landmark 1st Amendment case Times vs. Sullivan, which set strict limits on libel suits filed by public figures.