Professor Herma Hill Kay, an SMU english major and pioneer in legal teaching

Wall Street Journal

Originally Posted: June 23, 2017

Professor Herma Hill Kay was an SMU english major and a pioneer in legal teaching. She became the first woman to lead an elite law school, serving as the dean of UC Berkeley School of Law from 1992 to 2000. Ms. Kay was particularly focused on making marriage and divorce safer for women. Her expertise helped influenced a wide range of legislation. MORE

As a sixth-grader in South Carolina in the 1940s, Herma Hill Kay won a classroom debate in which she was the only student willing to argue that the South shouldn’t have won the Civil War.

Her civics teacher told her afterward, “If you were my daughter, I’d send you to law school.”

Ms. Kay’s mother, however, said it was silly to think she could make a living as a lawyer. “I think she had a sense of what the world was like for professional woman,” Ms. Kay said in a 2003 interview.

Shrugging off that early resistance, Ms. Kay attended the University of Chicago Law School on a full scholarship and graduated in 1959, where she was one of four women in her class. She became the first woman to lead an elite law school, serving as the dean of UC Berkeley School of Law from 1992 to 2000.

Ms. Kay taught at Berkeley for more than 50 years. Her expertise in family and antidiscrimination law made her a pioneer in legal teaching and helped influenced a wide range of legislation.

Ms. Kay, who married three times, was particularly focused on making marriage and divorce safer for women. In the 1960s, she helped draft and lobbied for a new law that made California the first state to allow couples to get divorced without showing a “fault,” such as adultery. Within the next two decades, nearly every U.S. state enacted similar laws.

“I’ve always felt very strongly…that women ought to be free and conscious actors,” Ms. Kay said in 2003. “So I was very opposed to anything that would stand in the way of their self-realization,” she added.

Ms. Kay died at her home in San Francisco on June 10, after a short illness. She was 82 years old.

At the time of her death, she had been working on a book about the history of women in legal teaching.

Born on Aug. 18, 1934, in Orangeburg, S.C., Ms. Kay was the only child of her father, a Methodist minister, and her mother, an elementary schoolteacher. Her parents both had college degrees, a rarity among her childhood peers. She moved every few years within South Carolina, following her father wherever he preached.

As a college student at Southern Methodist University, Ms. Kay joined the boys’ debate team and worked at the urging of her debate coach to lose her Southern accent. An English major, she was briefly a cheerleader and joined a sorority that “played a lot of bridge,” she has said.

Law school in Chicago was the first time Ms. Kay traveled outside the South. After a poor performance on a law school exam, one professor told her it was difficult for women to succeed in law and advised her to drop out.

Ms. Kay began her legal career in 1959, at a time when Wall Street law firms weren’t hiring women. She clerked for California Supreme Court Justice Roger Traynor, who endorsed her to join the Berkeley Law faculty in 1960.

One of her biggest challenges as dean was working to attract a diverse student body after California voters in 1996 passed a measure banning affirmative action at public universities. She was especially known for her mentorship of women students and younger law faculty.

“She was incredibly generous and supportive, in particular to women entering the teaching profession,” said Eleanor Swift, who served as Ms. Kay’s associate dean at Berkeley Law and knew her for more than 30 years.

Ms. Kay had a longstanding friendship with Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, after they first met at a legal conference in 1971 when the justice was a professor at Rutgers Law School. They were among the three co-authors of the first law school course materials on sex discrimination.

“There is a certain chemistry involved when one meets her, something that magically makes you want to be on her side,” Justice Ginsburg said in a 2015 speech, when presenting Ms. Kay with a lifetime achievement award in legal education.

In that speech, Justice Ginsburg called Ms. Kay “a woman of style,” saying Ms. Kay drove around San Francisco in a yellow Jaguar and flew a Piper Cub plane with her private pilot’s license. Ms. Kay also enjoyed swimming and gardening.

Ms. Kay is survived by three children and four grandchildren. Her husband, Dr. Carroll Brodsky, died in 2014. READ MORE