[1] He graduated summa cum laude with a Bachelor of Arts from the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University in 1982 after completing a 172-page long senior thesis titled "A Commitment Compromised: The Treatment of Nazi War Criminals by the United States Government.
[9] On June 4, 2007, Governor Corzine nominated Rabner to be Chief Justice of the New Jersey Supreme Court, replacing James R. Zazzali, who was nearing the mandatory retirement age.
[14] On May 21, 2014, Governor Chris Christie renominated Rabner as chief justice despite their political differences, after a compromise was reached with State Senate Democrats, breaking a longstanding impasse over Supreme Court appointments.
The following year, the NJ Supreme Court released expanded model jury instructions on eyewitness identifications for use in criminal cases,[25][26] consistent with the Henderson decision.
In light of recent advances in technology, the Earls decision noted that cell-phone providers in 2013 can pinpoint the location of a person's cell phone with increasing accuracy.
In 2023, the Supreme Court considered requests made by law enforcement to compel Facebook to provide the contents of users' accounts every 15 minutes for 30 days into the future.
Chief Justice Rabner authored a unanimous decision in 2013 denying the state's application for a stay of a trial court order permitting same-sex couples to marry.
[46] In North Jersey Media Group v. Lyndhurst,[47] the court concluded that once the principal witnesses to the shooting have been interviewed, the public's powerful interest in transparency calls for the release of police dash-cam videos under the common law right of access.
The Court held that the grants ran afoul of the State Constitution's Religious Aid Clause, which dates back to 1776 and bars the use of taxpayer funds to repair churches.
The court first held that any party seeking to run a criminal history check on a prospective juror must present a reasonable basis for the request and obtain advance permission from the trial judge.
The ruling also expanded existing law in concluding that the removal of a juror based on counsel's implicit or unconscious bias can violate a defendant's right to a fair trial in the same way that purposeful discrimination can.
[52] To avoid serious constitutional concerns, the Chief Justice's opinion construed the statute narrowly to apply to situations when markings on a license plate cannot reasonably be identified.
[53] The decision also declined to follow the United States Supreme Court's ruling in Heien v. North Carolina,[54] which held that a reasonable mistake of law could justify a stop under the Fourth Amendment, and noted that the New Jersey Constitution provides greater protection against unreasonable searches and seizures.
Starting in 2013, Rabner chaired a Joint Committee on Criminal Justice, composed of judges, the attorney general, public defender, representatives of the executive and legislative branches, the ACLU, and private practitioners.
[69][70] They showed criminal justice reform proved effective in maintaining the balance between public safety and the rights of the accused and that the practice of holding low-risk defendants in jail for the inability to pay bail had declined dramatically.