In the 1990s, he became a private estate planner and taught at the University of California, Berkeley, School of Law, and then at the University of San Francisco School of Law, where he taught contract law until his retirement in 2016.
His approach to teaching contract law was quite different from Kingsfield’s. The balance of power, he wrote, rested with the students, not the professor. He said that in his first class of each semester, he stood at the lectern until the students were totally silent.
“I explain to them that I’m not going to call on anyone,” he wrote in 2011. “They will have to volunteer to talk. Why am I not going to just call on students? I am not clairvoyant like their other professors. I have no idea which students have something to contribute to the discussion. Therefore I’m going to have to rely on them to tell when they have something to say.”
Two years after his retirement, he published his final novel, “Listen to the Marriage” (2018), set entirely in the office of a marriage counselor.
In addition to his daughter, who graduated from Harvard Law in 2006, Mr. Osborn is survived by his wife, a retired doctor; his sons, Samuel and Frederick; six grandchildren; his brothers, Oliver, Joseph and Ed; and his sisters, Mimi Oliver, Cindi Garvie and Anne Weiser-Truchan.
At the end of Mr. Osborn’s novel, Hart stops Kingsfield on campus to tell him how much his class had meant to him.
“Good,” Kingsfield says. “That’s fine.” And, as the professor starts to smile, he asks, coldly, “What was your name?”
