Herma Hill Kay

Herma Hill Kay died peacefully at home in San Francisco on June 10, 2017, at the age of 82, after a short illness. Her family was at her side.

Herma was born and raised in rural South Carolina to an elementary school teacher (Herma Lee Crawford) and an army chaplain (Charles Esdorn Hill) on August 18, 1934. When she was in the sixth grade, Herma knew that she wanted to be a lawyer. After graduating from high school, she received her B.A., from Southern Methodist University in 1956 and her J.D. from the University of Chicago School of Law in 1959. She served as a law clerk to Justice Roger Traynor of the California Supreme Court before joining the faculty of Boalt Hall at Berkeley in 1960, where she remained active for 57 years, becoming the Barbara Nachtrieb Armstrong Professor of Law.

As the second woman hired to the Boalt Hall Law faculty, Herma was one of the leading advocates for women in law. She quickly became a much-admired professor of Family Law, Conflicts of Law, SexBased Discrimination, and California Marital Property Law. She served as Dean of Boalt Hall from 1992 to 2000—the first woman to lead a top ten U.S. law school. Over the course of her long career, Herma made enormous contributions to the field of law, as well as to the Law School and the Berkeley campus. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg wrote “Herma has spearheaded countless endeavors to shape the legal academy and the legal profession to serve all the people the law exists (or should exist) to serve, and to make law genuinely protective of women’s capacity to chart their own life’s course.”

Herma’s interest in expanding women’s opportunities would be felt throughout the Law School and the legal profession. During her tenure at Boalt, the number of women students increased from a small handful to over fifty percent of the class. As Professor Eleanor Swift recounts, “[Herma’s] mentoring of women law students and young faculty opened the door to legal careers that simply did not exist before she and other women of her generation began to imagine them. The women law professors whom she mentored throughout her career constitute her enduring legacy to the law and to legal education.”

Herma’s influence as a scholar can be felt in the fields of Family Law, Conflicts of Law, and Anti-Discrimination Law. As part of Governor Edmund Brown’s 1966 Commission on the Family, she was pivotal in shepherding California’s shift to “no-fault” divorce, a move that was later adopted in almost every American jurisdiction. As Interim Dean Melissa Murray observed in a California Law Review symposium dedicated to Herma, “She literally transformed the legal landscape of American family life. In the late 1960s and 1970s, as a revolution in substantive sex equality was sweeping California, Herma was at its center.”

Herma was a co-author of the leading casebooks on Sex Discrimination and Law and Conflict of Laws. Her casebook on Sex Discrimination in the Law, which she co-authored with Kenneth Davidson and Ruth Bader Ginsburg, was the first published course material in the field. Herma also served as a Co-Reporter of the Uniform Marriage and Divorce Act in 1968. She published numerous articles and book chapters on subjects including sexual discrimination and the law, conflict of law, family law, divorce, adoption, reproductive rights, and representing under-represented women. At the time of her death, she was nearing completion of a history of women in law teaching between 1900 and 2000. The first part of this work recounts the stories of the fourteen women appointed to a law faculty in the U.S. before 1960, when she joined the Boalt faculty.

As the Dean of Boalt Hall, Herma faced critical challenges and seized upon important opportunities. Recognizing the need and desire for hands-on legal training, she launched the Center for Clinical Education, making Boalt one of the first top law schools to enter the field of clinical education. She led the Law School in the aftermath of Proposition 209, maintaining the Law School’s commitment to diversity and providing opportunity for the disadvantaged.

Although she was prodigiously accomplished, Herma was also a generous institutional citizen—at the Law School, on campus, and in the profession. In 1998, she was named one of the 50 most influential female lawyers in the country and one of the eight most influential lawyers in Northern California by the National Law Journal. She was a Member of the Council of the American Law Institute, a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a Member of the American Philosophical Society, President of the Association of American Law Schools, and Chair of Berkeley’s Academic Senate, among other positions.

Herma’s pioneering work as a scholar, teacher, and administrator has been widely recognized. In 1992, she was awarded the Margaret Brent Award to Women Lawyers of Distinction from the ABA Commission on Women in the Profession. In 2015, she received the AALS’s Triennial Award for Lifetime Service to Legal Education and the Law. That same year, the AALS Section on Women in Legal Education awarded Herma its Ruth Bader Ginsburg Lifetime Achievement Award. It was wonderful that Justice Ginsburg was there to present the award to her longtime friend and co-author.

In her spare time, Herma was a pilot, an avid swimmer, and an accomplished gardener. In a very real sense she had two families; her family at home, and her close friends, colleagues, and students at UC Berkeley. Her husband, Dr. Carroll Brodsky, a psychiatrist, passed away in 2014. Herma is survived by her three sons (Michael, John, and Tom Brodsky), and her four grandchildren (Jessica, Alexander, Adam, and Matthew Brodsky). Her legacy will continue to be felt through her immeasurable impact on the legal, political, university, and family communities whose lives were left enriched by her ideals.

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