Gustin Reichbach, Judge With a Radical History, Dies at 65 Justice Gustin L. Reichbach, who went from the carefree fraternity life to leading student protests at Columbia University in 1968 and then to a career as a fiercely independent lawyer and judge, died on Saturday in Brooklyn. He was 65. The cause was complications of pancreatic cancer, his wife, Ellen Meyers, said. Across six decades of myriad public incarnations, Justice Reichbach occupied buildings at Columbia as a student, won a court case that helped legalize residential loft life in SoHo and TriBeCa, blasted a state agency from the bench for ignoring Medicaid fraud and served as a judge on a war-crimes tribunal in Kosovo. Elected to the New York State Supreme Court in 1999, he decorated his courtroom with pictures of Paul Robeson, Clarence Darrow and striking coal miners, as well as a neon sign showing the scales of justice. Justice Reichbach was born in Brooklyn on Oct. 9, 1946, and grew up in Flatbush, one of two sons of a machinist who organized unions. After graduating from Midwood High School, he attended the State University at Buffalo, where he was the president of Alpha Epsilon Pi, a Jewish fraternity. As the Vietnam War was escalating, the arrival of an R.O.T.C. military recruiting office on campus awoke a radical spirit in Mr. Reichbach, said Daniel L. Alterman, a friend who attended Buffalo with him. His engagement with radical politics gathered force when he was admitted to Columbia University School of Law. A classmate, Bruce Ratner, now a real estate developer, recalled meeting him as they stood in line to pay tuition in September 1967. "This guy with long blond curly hair, almost white, started talking to me with a Brooklyn accent that sounded like it was right out of "On the Waterfront" and asked me if I'd found a place to stay," Mr. Ratner said. By the time they reached the front of the line, Mr. Ratner invited him to crash in his apartment on 103rd Street. As a leader of the Columbia chapter of Students for a Democratic Society, an organization that emerged in the 1960s to protest American foreign and domestic policies, Mr. Reichbach was shown on the cover of Newsweek facing off with the police during the occupation of buildings on campus. "For Gus, it was a very big thing to go to law school, and in those days an arrest could mean you weren't going to become a lawyer," Mr. Ratner said. Put on probation after raucous disciplinary hearings, Mr. Reichbach discovered when he graduated in 1970 that a professor had written to the New York Bar Association, objecting to his admission; one issue was his co-authorship of "The Bust Book" with, among others, Kathy Boudin, then on the F.B.I."s Most Wanted list for blowing up a town house in Greenwich Village. While waiting two years to be accepted, he worked for the New York Law Collective, an organization that shared its revenue equally among lawyers and clerical workers and provided legal help to, among others, Abbie Hoffman and members of the Black Panthers. When he was admitted at last, his practice included artists who had moved into industrial lofts in Lower Manhattan and were being evicted by landlords who claimed they had no right to continued residency. His first judicial election was to the civil court in 1990, by fewer than 150 votes. He was immediately transferred to night criminal court. Three months into his term, after nightly arraignments of a parade of prostitutes who were immediately released, Justice Reichbach contacted a group that provided condoms and H.I.V. testing and counseling. "They weren't exactly in the courtroom," Justice Reichbach recalled. I invited them to set up a table right outside the doors. To his delight, he was called the "Condom Judge" on the front page of The Daily News. This displeased his supervisors, who had not been aware of the initiative; they transferred him back to the civil courts. There he ordered that a landlord be confined to one of her properties until its dangerous violations were cleared. In court, Justice Reichbach wore robes only on sentencing days. A white scarf usually accented his three-piece suits, along with a Phi Beta Kappa key from his undergraduate days. His curly mane lost none of its exuberance as it grayed. He presided at scores of homicide trials, and his occasional sparring with prosecutors left no trace of rancor. "His passing is a great loss to the profession," Charles J. Hynes, the Brooklyn district attorney, said in a statement. Mr. Reichbach and Ms. Meyers were the parents of a daughter, Hope, who died in 2011. In addition to his wife, he is survived by a brother, Eliyahu Ben-Haim. In May, Justice Reichbach wrote an Op-Ed article in The New York Times imploring the State Legislature to make marijuana available for medical purposes. He himself was using it, he said, to ease his cancer treatments. Shrugging off worries about repercussions, he wrote, "It is to help all who have been affected by cancer, and those who will come after, that I now speak."