Patricia Wald, pathbreaking federal judge, dies at 90

Shortly before she graduated from Yale Law School in 1951, Patricia Wald secured a job interview with a white-shoe Manhattan firm. The hiring partner was impressed with her credentials — she was one of two women on the law review — but lamented her timing.

“It’s really a shame,” she recalled the man saying. “If only you could have been here last week.” A woman had been hired then, she was told, and it would be a long time before the firm considered bringing another on board.

Gradually, working nights and weekends while raising five children, she built a career in Washington as an authority on bail reform and family law. Working for a pro bono legal services group and an early publicinterest law firm, she won cases that broadened protections for society’s most vulnerable, including indigent women and children with special needs.

She became an assistant attorney general under President Jimmy Carter, who in 1979 appointed her to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit — often described as the country’s most important bench after the U.S. Supreme Court. She was the first woman to serve on the D.C. Circuit court and was its chief judge from 1986 to 1991. Later, she was a member of the United Nations tribunal on war crimes and genocide in the former Yugoslavia.

Wald, whom Barack Obama called “one of the most respected appellate judges of her generation” when he awarded her the Presidential Medal of Freeshe dom in 2013, died Saturday at her home in Washington. She was 90.

The cause was pancreatic cancer, said a son, Douglas.

On the D.C. Circuit, Wald served on three-member panels that decided some of the most complicated legal disputes on the docket. She wrote more than 800 opinions during her tenure — many on technical matters involving separation of powers, administrative law and the environment — and counted herself among the more liberal jurists, viewing the law as a tool to achieve social progress.

In 1986, Wald dissented in a 2-1 ruling that upheld a D.C. ordinance that made it illegal, within 500 feet of a foreign embassy, for protesters to display signs hostile to the embassy’s government or to disobey a police order for three or more people to disperse.

At the time, demonstrators regularly gathered outside the South African Embassy to shame the apartheid regime and outside the Nicaraguan and Soviet embassies to call attention to human rights violations. (The case was brought by conservative activists protesting Nicaragua’s radical left-wing Sandinista regime and the treatment of Soviet dissident Andrei Sakharov.)

Writing for the majority, Judge Robert Bork cited the obligation of the United States to uphold the dignity of foreign governments. Wald responded that the ruling “gouges out an enormously important category of political speech from First Amendment protection.”

Two years later, the Supreme Court reversed the D.C. Circuit’s ruling on the display of hostile signs outside an embassy. The high court also endorsed a severely restricted view of the authority to disperse gatherings of three or more people, declaring that it could be used only when police believe that there is a threat to the “security or peace” of an embassy.