John Clinton Gray

John Clinton Gray (December 4, 1843 – June 28, 1915) and his sister, Katharine Gray (wife of Hackley Bartholomew Bacon) and Frances Susan Gray. He was of French-Huguenot and Polish descent.

He was educated in Paris and at the University of Berlin. He graduated A.B. from New York University in 1865. Then he studied law at Harvard University and graduated LL.B. in 1866. In 1868, he received the degree of A.M. from New York University. Until , Gray was a Republican, when he became a Democrat, but reportedly, he was uninterested in politics. In November 1888, he was elected on the Democratic ticket to a full fourteen-year term, was re-elected in 1902, and remained on the bench until the end of 1913 when he reached the constitutional age limit of 70 years.

He is known for his strict constructivist dissent in the 1889 probate case of Riggs v. Palmer, where he argued against disinheriting a murder who benefitted from his victim's will because of a statute expressly forbidding the revocation or alteration of wills. Gray authored another notable dissent in 1903 in Roberson v. Rochester Folding Box Co., in which he sided with an employee suing her employer for using her likeness in an advertising pamphlet without her permission. He argued for the court to recognize an equitable right to privacy.

Personal life Gray was married to Henrietta Pauline "Etta" Gunther (1848–1883), a daughter of William Henry Gunther. Before her death in 1883, they were the parents of five children: They divorced and she married Thomas Franklin Witherspoon in 1906. a Deputy District Attorney in New York County under William T. Jerome; he married Edith Florence Deacon, daughter of Edward Parker Deacon and sister of Gladys Spencer-Churchill, Duchess of Marlborough, in 1916. a son of U.S. Representative Robert R. Hitt, in 1902. who married Marian Anthon Fish (1880–1944), a daughter of Mamie Fish and Stuyvesant Fish, in 1907. They divorced in 1934. Austen Gray (1881–1954), who married Grace Eaton.

After the death of his first wife, he married Grace Townsend ( Hawkshurst) Smith Turnbull (1846–1930), who was born on Staten Island. Grace, the widow of both James R. Smith and Henry Turnbull, was a daughter of William Hawkshurst and Sarah ( Townsend) Hawkshurst. After a funeral at St. Bartholomew's Church was buried at Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx. His widow Grace died in 1930.

Descendants Through his eldest son Henry, he was a grandfather of three granddaughters: Audrey Gray (who married John R. Chapin Jr. in 1950); Beatrice D. Milo Gray (who married Austen T. Gray in 1941); and Alison Evelyn Gray (who married John F. Murray Jr. in 1948).

Through his son Albert, he was a grandfather of Marian Stuyvesant Gray (who married Edward Fiedler Livingston Bruen in 1942).

Through his eldest daughter Edith, he was a grandfather of Robert R. Hitt (who married Evelyn Bigelow Clark in 1932).