Richard Rosner ’62

Dick, a pioneering doctor whose writing and practice helped to establish the field of forensic psychiatry, died Jan. 6, 2025.

He graduated from Abraham Lincoln High School in Brooklyn, N.Y., and majored in French at Princeton. Our classmate Barry Bosak remembers Dick as the most passionate member of a small class of advanced students who met once a week at the home of Professor B.W. Bates: “He was simply fired up on what was going through Montaigne’s mind as he jotted down his thoughts.” Dick earned his medical degree from the NYU School of Medicine and did his psychiatric residency at Mount Sinai Medical Center. He met his wife, Bernice, a nurse, after graduating from medical school. She died in 2001.

Dick served as president of numerous organizations central to the emergence of forensic psychiatry as a discipline, including the American Academy of Psychiatry and the Law, the American Society for Adolescent Psychiatry, and the American Academy of Forensic Sciences. A prolific author, he wrote a series of books and articles on topics in the field. The culmination of this work, Principles and Practice of Forensic Psychiatry, appeared in 1994 and became a standard text.