John Jay Osborn Jr.

John Jay Osborn Jr. (August 5, 1945 – October 19, 2022) was an American author, lawyer and legal academic.

Osborn was born in Boston on August 5, 1945.

His father, John Jay Sr., was a doctor at Stanford University School of Medicine; his mother was Anne (née Kidder).

He was a descendant of both John Jay, the first Chief Justice of the United States, and of railroad baron Cornelius Vanderbilt.

His family relocated to the Bay Area when Osborn was nine.

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.

For his third-year writing project at Harvard Law, Osborn wrote The Paper Chase, a fictional account of one Harvard Law School student's battles with the imperious Professor Charles Kingsfield.

Osborn married Emilie Heffron Sisson in 1968.

She was a Radcliffe College graduate who worked as a physician with the Palo Alto Medical Foundation, and they remained married until his death.

Together, they had three children, Sam, Meredith (who also attended Harvard College and Harvard Law School) and Shef.

Osborn died on October 19, 2022, at his home in San Francisco.

He was 77 years old and suffered from squamous cell cancer prior to his death.

Novels

Scripts

After graduating from law school, Osborn clerked for Judge Max Rosenn of the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit from 1970 to 1972.

He was later an associate attorney with the firm Patterson Belknap Webb & Tyler.

He is best known for his bestselling novel The Paper Chase published in 1971.

Osborn found a publisher with the assistance of William Alfred and the book was released in 1971.

It was made into a film two years later, starring John Houseman and Timothy Bottoms.

Houseman won an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for his performance as contracts professor Kingsfield.

The Paper Chase also became a television series, and Osborn wrote several of the scripts.

He was also one of the writers (along with Thomas A. Cohen) of the screenplay for the 2010 film version of the 1983 novel The River Why by David James Duncan.

Osborn 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 2018.

Osborn's third novel, The Associates, was adapted into a short-lived television series starring Martin Short and Wilfrid Hyde-White.

His final book, Listen to the Marriage, was published in 2018.