D.C. appellate judge was pioneer for women in law

Patricia M. Wald, the first woman to serve as chief judge of the federal appeals court in Washington and later wrote seminal rulings while serving in The Hague on the international court for war crimes in the former Yugoslavia, died Saturday at her home in Washington, D.C. She was 90.

Her daughter, Johanna Wald, confirmed her death and said the cause was pancreatic cancer.

Wald was a pioneer for women in law, rising from a working-class Irish family to enter the legal profession at a time when women were a rare presence. She eventually became the first woman to serve on — and preside over — the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, widely regarded as the second most influential court in the country. Her career spanned a generational change that propelled women into visible and prominent roles, including on the Supreme Court, a job for which she was once in consideration.

Her path to becoming an important progressive voice in American jurisprudence showed the obstacles women faced in the mid-20th century. She graduated from Yale Law School in 1951; when she began, three years earlier, Harvard Law School did not even entertain applications from women. She became a law clerk for Jerome Frank, a prominent appeals court judge in New York, and worked briefly for some of Washington’s most prominent lawyers before leaving the workplace for 10 years to be at home with her family. She raised five children with her husband, Robert Wald, a Yale Law School classmate who established a thriving Washington law practice. He died in 2010.

Patricia Ann McGowan Wald was born Sept. 16, 1928, in Torrington, Conn., the only child of Margaret O’Keefe and Joseph McGowan. In describing her childhood for oral history projects, she said she grew up in a crowded Irish-American household with an extended family of mostly women after her father left home when she was 2. While her mother and an aunt often worked as secretaries, the rest of the household revolved around episodic factory work at the Torrington Co.

She joined the Court of Appeals in Washington in 1979. She was its first female member, but was soon joined by Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who would go on to become the second woman to serve on the Supreme Court.

Within days of her retirement from the appeals court, she arrived in The Hague as a judge on the Yugoslav tribunal. After nearly a year of graphic testimony, she wrote the landmark judgment in the Krstic case, which found for the first time that the massacre of about 8,000 men and boys at Srebrenica constituted genocide.

In 2013, President Barack Obama awarded her the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian honor.

She is survived by five children — Douglas, Frederica, Johanna, Sarah and Thomas Wald — and by 10 grandchildren.