Gilbert Ray Hawes

Gilbert Ray Hawes (December 8, 1854 – April 15, 1923) was an American lawyer and author. He practiced law from 1878 until his death in 1923, and was involved in several high-profile cases. Gilbert Ray Hawes was born in Brooklyn, New York, on December 8, 1854. He was a descendant of Edward Hawes, a 1635 settler of colonial Massachusetts. His father was a merchant and his grandfather was the lawyer and author William Post Hawes.

Hawes attended Columbia Grammar School. As a teenager, he arranged Franz Abt's Lark's Rejoicing for an 1872 performance at a "Peace Jubilee" in Boston in which it was performed by Minna Peschka-Leutner. He was educated at Amherst College where he graduated in 1876. He pursued further studies at Columbia Law School where he earned a Bachelor of Laws in 1878 and a Master of Arts in 1884. He was particularly active in corporate law and real estate law, and was instrumental in the passage of a law around the Torrens title in the state of New York.

In 1892 Hawes was involved in the high-profile Seixas Case involving the Government of Venezuela and American diplomat William Lindsay Scruggs, during which time he exposed Scruggs for paying bribes to Venezuela's president, Raimundo Andueza Palacio. On March 18, 1895, he was elected a member of the New York Genealogical and Biographical Society.

On June 1, 1903, Hawes married Gertrude Newman Dunlop in Kansas City, Missouri. They never had children. At that time Heinrich Conried was director of the Met. The case was over the copyright and performing rights to Wagner's opera Parsifal. The Met claimed that the work was not copyrighted in the United States, and therefore the company had the right to perform the opera without the Wagner family's permission. and the Met ultimately won the case.

In another high-profile case, The MMA's board had removed Biondi's sculpture Saturnalia from display at the museum after being appalled by the "immorality" of the subject matter which led Biondi to sue for breach of contract.

In addition to his work as a lawyer, Hawes was active as a lecturer for the board of the New York City Department of Education for a six-year period,