Betty Barry-Deal — 1st woman appointed to S.F. appeals court
Betty Barry-Deal, an honor student whose gender slowed the start of her legal career in the 1950s but who later became the first female justice on the state Court of Appeal in San Francisco, has died at age 95.
Family members said Justice Barry-Deal died March 12 at her daughter’s home in Ventura. She had retired in 1990 after 13 years as a judge.
“Justice Barry-Deal was a legal trailblazer her entire career,” said Deborah Hoffman, spokeswoman for Gov. Jerry Brown, who appointed Justice Barry-Deal to the court during his first stint as governor.
Born in Reno, Betty Barry grew up in Susanville (Lassen County), where she was valedictorian of her high school class in 1938 and her junior college class in 1940. She enrolled at Stanford, left school to work in the Red Cross during World War II, then transferred to UC Berkeley and was a Phi Beta Kappa graduate.
Her husband, John Deal, died of a sudden illness while she was attending law school at Berkeley in 1951. She graduated, passed the bar exam in 1955 and couldn’t find a job as a lawyer, an experience shared by other women of her era, including Supreme Court Justices Sandra Day O’Connor and Ruth Bader Ginsburg. “The whole East Bay, there were no firms that would take a woman,” Justice Barry-Deal said in 2006. She recalled a similar response at Stanford when she signed up as a prelaw student and was given a law professor as her adviser, who “looked at me in dismay like, ‘She can’t be serious.’ ”
After what she described as a period of depression from her job search, she volunteered at the Alameda County public defender’s office, then found work editing law books for the State Bar’s Continuing Education of the Bar program.
She left in 1965 to open a private law practice, specializing in family law, and moved to a law firm in 1970.
Brown appointed her to the Alameda County Superior Court in 1977, and named her three years later to the First District Court of Appeal, a judicial level previously reached by only a handful of women in California, but none in San Francisco.
One of her rulings, in 1983, reinstated a lawsuit by a woman who nearly died from complications of pregnancy and sued the man who had impregnated her after allegedly telling her he was sterile.
Another 1983 ruling by Justice Barry-Deal overturned a jury’s $775,000 damage award to a transgender woman who sued the Oakland Tribune and one of its columnists for revealing her status, which she had kept private, and writing that her classmates at the College of Alameda, where she was student body president, “may wish to make other showering arrangements.”
Justice Barry-Deal said the trial judge had wrongly required the newspaper to prove that the subject was newsworthy, rather than requiring the woman’s lawyers to prove it wasn’t. But she also said the woman had legitimate privacy concerns that jurors needed to weigh against the newspaper’s right to publish. The case was later settled out of court.
In 1987, her court ruled that a gay man could not seek damages for emotional distress against a man who had injured his partner. While Justice Barry-Deal joined the ruling, she said marital rights and benefits for same-sex couples were “a matter of public policy demanding the attention of the Legislature.” Those rights were ultimately recognized by federal courts in California in 2013, and nationwide by the Supreme Court in 2015.
After retiring from the bench in 1990, Justice Barry-Deal delved into genealogy and wrote histories of her family, whose ancestors included pioneer Daniel Boone.
She is survived by her daughter, Diana Deal; her son, Thomas Deal; a brother, James Barry; a sister, Lynn Pickart; six grandchildren; and eight great-grandchildren. Private services are planned.