The Hon. John Owens will present "The Clerk, The Thief, His Life As A Baker: Ashton Embry and the Supreme Court Leak Scandal of 1919" at this lunch talk. On December 16, 1919, Ashton Fox Embry, law clerk to Supreme Court Justice Joseph McKenna, abruptly resigned from the position he had held for almost nine years. His explanation? His fledgling bakery business required his undivided attention. Newspapers that morning hinted at a different reason:  Embry resigned because he had conspired with at least three individuals to use inside knowledge of upcoming U.S. Supreme Court decisions to profit on Wall Street.  A grand jury returned an indictment against Embry and his associates a few months later, and Embry’s argument that he had committed no crime ultimately reached the Supreme Court, the very institution he was accused of betraying. Despite the sensational headlines and fierce legal battle arising from his indictment, the United States Attorney quietly dismissed Embry’s case in 1929, almost ten years after the story had broken. Few Court scholars have ever heard of Embry, and the memory of Embry, much like the case against him, has disappeared with time. Judge Owens will unravel the “Supreme Court Leak Case” by reconstructing what happened almost eighty years ago.

Judge Owens is a United States Circuit Judge for the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. The seat was the nation’s longest-existing judicial vacancy, dating back to Judge Stephen S. Trott who took senior status in 2004.  Owens was nominated by President Obama in August 2013 and took his seat soon after confirmation. He is one of the youngest serving federal appellate court judges in the nation. Owens was awarded the American Bar Association’s highest rating of “unanimously well qualified to serve” on the federal appellate bench.

A highly regarded federal prosecutor with more than 11 years of service, Owens has prosecuted a broad range of criminal cases. In 2001, he became an Assistant U.S. attorney in the Central District of California.  He transferred to the Southern District of California in 2004 and became the chief of its criminal division in 2010.  As a prosecutor, Owens focused on white-collar prosecutions, and his extensive trial and appellate experience earned him awards from the Department of Justice, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Secret Service, and other federal law enforcement agencies.  He left the U.S. Attorney’s Office in 2012 to become a partner at Munger, Tolles & Olson LLP, focusing on complex business and Supreme Court litigation.  He has appeared in two episodes of CNBC's American Greed.

After graduating first in his class from Stanford Law School, Owens served as a law clerk first to Judge J. Clifford Wallace on the Ninth Circuit and then for U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

His chambers are in San Diego, California.