Herma Hill Kay — 1st U.S. female law dean guided UC Berkeley
As the law school dean at UC Berkeley from 1992 to 2000, Herma Hill Kay was the first woman to lead any of the nation’s elite legal academies.
Beyond that — as Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, a friend for nearly a half century, put it — “law teacher and scholar nonpareil, Herma has spearheaded countless endeavors to shape the legal academy and the legal profession to serve all the people law exists (or should exist) to serve, and to make law genuinely protective of women’s capacity to chart their own life’s course.”
Ms. Kay died in her sleep June 10 at age 82. She taught Berkeley law classes for nearly 57 years after becoming the school’s second-ever female law professor in 1960. At the time of her appointment, only 14 women had previously gained tenure at U.S. law schools, and they were the subject of a book she had nearly completed at the time of her death.
Ms. Kay’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,” law Professor Eleanor Swift said in a 2016 law review article.
One of those she mentored, as both a student and a teacher, described Ms. Kay as “wonderful and somewhat terrifying.”
“She set tremendously high standards for her students,” said Catherine Albiston, who Ms. Kay hired as a research assistant in the 1990s and is now a Berkeley law professor. “We succeeded because Herma told us we could do this, at a time when there were not many women in law school.”
She also worked to change the law, particularly in family relations.
As a member of Gov. Pat Brown’s Commission on the Family, Ms. Kay helped to draft California’s pioneering 1969 law establishing no-fault divorce, allowing couples to end their marriage voluntarily without having to prove that one spouse or the other had committed adultery or another culpable action. She then took a leading role in drafting a model no-fault law that was eventually adopted in some form by every other state, the last being New York in 2010.
“She literally transformed the legal landscape of American family life,” said Melissa Murray, the interim law dean at Berkeley.
The no-fault law “was never undertaken to achieve equality between men and women,” Ms. Kay told an interviewer in 2008. “It was undertaken to try to get the blackmail out of divorce, and I think it has accomplished that.”
With co-authors who included future Justice Ginsburg, Ms. Kay also produced a 1974 text on “Sex Discrimination in the Law,” the first published law book on the subject. The two had met at a conference on Women and the Law in 1971, and Ginsburg, in a 2015 tribute, said Ms. Kay had remained “my wise, brave and cherished friend.”
Born in South Carolina, Ms. Kay said her career path was influenced by a sixth-grade teacher, who told her after a classroom debate on the Civil War, “If you were my daughter, I’d send you to law school.”
She attended Southern Methodist University and the University of Chicago Law School, where she edited the law review and graduated in 1959. After serving as a law clerk to California Supreme Court Justice Roger Traynor, she began her teaching career at Berkeley’s Boalt Hall.
As the school’s dean in the 1990s, she established the Center for Clinical Education, which helped students learn legal skills outside the classroom while providing legal aid for the needy.
“Her insight was that Boalt was not going to survive as a top 10 school if it did not develop a clinical program,” said Swift, who was the school’s associate dean from 1998 to 2000. “She was hiring a cadre of clinical professors ... and creating clinics that would serve the public interest,” eventually including clinics on environmental law, legal issues in technology, and the death penalty.
When Gov. Pete Wilson led UC regents to ban race-based admissions in 1995, and California voters took the same step for all state and local government programs in 1996, Ms. Kay launched programs to try to maintain campus diversity without considering students’ race.
Swift said Ms. Kay and the school’s admissions director “began scouring the country” for talented students of all backgrounds, and were able to attract a substantial minority enrollment without affirmative action.
Ms. Kay also served as chair of UC Berkeley’s Academic Senate and as president of the American Academy of Law Schools, which in 2015 honored her for Lifetime Service to Legal Education and the Law, the first woman to receive the award.
She was also a pilot and an accomplished gardener.
Her husband, Carroll Brodsky, died in 2014. She is survived by three sons, Michael, John and Tom, and by four grandchildren.
A memorial service is being planned. The university said contributions to funds in Ms. Kay’s honor can be arranged by contacting alumni@law.berkeley.edu.