MILESTONES

DIED. ROBERT WILENTZ, 69, Chief Justice of the New Jersey Supreme Court; of cancer; in New York City. Wilentz's court issued rulings that allowed expert testimony on the "battered-woman syndrome" in homicide cases and sanctioned public notification of the residency of sex offenders.

DIED. HAMILTON FISH, 70, New York Republican elected to Congress 13 times; of cancer; in Washington. The fourth generation in his family to serve in Congress--and to bear the name Hamilton--Fish helped pass the Fair Housing Act of 1988 and the Americans with Disabilities Act.

DIED. PETER LUDWIG, 71, chocolate manufacturer and art connoisseur; of a ruptured colon; in Aachen, Germany. His collection of 144 illuminated medieval manuscripts was the most important assembled by an individual.

DIED. JESSICA MITFORD, 78, muckraking journalist and best-selling author; of cancer; in Oakland, Calif. In her quest to "embarrass the guilty," Mitford wrote books on the funeral business (The American Way of Death, 1969), the U.S. prison system (Kind and Unusual Punishment, 1973) and obstetrics (The American Way of Birth, 1992). She also wrote about her aristocratic and eccentric British family, from which she was disinherited after eloping with a second cousin in 1936. Her eldest sister was the novelist Nancy Mitford.

DIED. LEON SHENANDOAH, 81, Tadadaho (political and spiritual leader) of the four-century-old Six Nations of the Iroquois Confederacy; in Syracuse, New York.

DIED. VERMONT CONNECTICUT ROYSTER, 82, Pulitzer-prizewinning newspaperman who helped shape the Wall Street Journal into America's leading business daily; in Raleigh, North Carolina. Royster, whose family had a tradition of naming children after states, wrote a folksy column for 15 years after retiring in 1971.