John Jay Osborn, Jr.
| Professor John Jay Osborn, Jr. | |
|---|---|
Osborn in 2016
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| Born | August 5, 1945 |
| Occupation | novelist, screenwriter, attorney, law professor |
| Notable works | The Paper Chase, The Associates |
John Jay Osborn, Jr. is an American author, lawyer and legal academic. He is best known for his bestselling novel, The Paper Chase, a fictional account of one Harvard Law School student's battles with the imperious Professor Charles Kingsfield. The book was made into a movie starring John Houseman and Timothy Bottoms. Houseman won an Oscar for his performance as contracts professor Kingsfield. The Paper Chase also became a television series. Osborn wrote several of the scripts. Osborn's other books include The Associates, The Man Who Owned New York, and The Only Thing I've Done Wrong. His third novel, The Associates, was adapted into a short-lived television series starring Martin Short and Wilfrid Hyde-White.
He is one of the writers (along with Thomas A. Cohen) of the screenplay for the film version of the 1983 novel The River Why by David James Duncan. The movie, starring William Hurt and Kathleen Quinlan, was screened in 2010 at various film festivals.
His parents were John Jay and Anne Kidder Osborn and he is a descendant of John Jay, the first Chief Justice of the United States and of Cornelius Vanderbilt.
He received a Bachelor of Arts in American History from Harvard University in 1967 and graduated with a Juris Doctor from Harvard Law School in 1970. He also did graduate work at Yale Law School. He taught law at the University of Miami, the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law at Yeshiva University, the UC Berkeley School of Law, and The University of San Francisco School of Law, from which he retired in 2010. He clerked for Judge Max Rosenn of the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit from 1970 to 1972, and was later an attorney with the firm Patterson Belknap Webb & Tyler.
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