Richard Owen '45

Senior Judge, U.S. District Court, New York Southern District

As a federal attorney, Owen prosecuted President Truman's would-be assassins. As a federal judge in New York City for almost two decades, Owen has fined former Beatle George Harrison for subconscious plagiarism, refused Alger Hiss a new trial, handled Three Mile Island litigation, and sent top mob boss Carmine Persico to a century in the slammer. Then there are his operas, seven of them, Owen writing both the music and the libretti. His 1976 work, Mary Dyer, was revived last year by the New York Lyric Opera Company, with wife Lynn Owen, a former Metropolitan Opera soloist, in the lead role. The New York Daily News called the work, a three-act opera based on a seventeenth-century Quaker feminist martyr, "one of the most distinguished of American operas." His next piece: an opera based on Somerset Maugham's short story, "Rain." So what is the connection between his two careers? "When I was a trial lawyer, I learned to stage my arguments to build the drama and end with a bang, which is the same way I try to write operas," he explains.

Owen's twocareers arein harmony.