Herma Hill Kay (August 18, 1934 – June 10, 2017) was the Barbara Nachtrieb Armstrong Professor of Law at UC Berkeley School of Law (Boalt Hall). She previously served as dean of Boalt from 1992 to 2000.[1] She specialized in family law and conflict of laws.
Biography
Kay was born in Orangeburg, South Carolina in 1934[2][3] to a third-grade teacher mother, Herma Lee Crawford, and an Army chaplain father, Charles Esdorn Hill.[3][4] She studied English at Southern Methodist University and graduated magna cum laude in 1956. At SMU, she was inducted into Phi Beta Kappa.[5] She then attended law school at the University of Chicago, graduating third in her class in 1959. After law school, she clerked for one year for Justice Roger Traynor of the California Supreme Court. She joined the faculty at Boalt Hall in 1960[5] and became dean of that faculty in 1992.[6] Kay died on June 10, 2017, at the age of 82.[7]
Works, honors, and recognition
In 1966, Kay served on the California Governor's Commission on the Family, which proposed that California adopt a no-fault regime for divorce. The state of California adopted a law based on that recommendation, the first of its kind in the United States, in 1970.[8] Along with Robert Levy, she was co-reporter of the committee that prepared the Uniform Marriage and Divorce Act.[9][10]
In 1969, Kay, along with Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Kenneth M. Davidson, authored the first casebook on sex discrimination, Sex-Based Discrimination: Text, Cases, and Materials (West, 1969).[11]
In 1985, Kay was elected to the Council of the American Law Institute.[12] She was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1989. Kay was president of the Association of American Law Schools in 1989 and secretary of the American Bar Association Section on Legal Education and Admissions to the Bar from 1999 to 2001. In 2000, she became a member of the American Philosophical Society.[13] She received 1992 Margaret Brent Award to Women Lawyers of Distinction and the 2003 Boalt Hall Alumni Association Faculty Lifetime Achievement Award.[1]
Kay has also been recognized for her teaching, receiving the UC Berkeley Distinguished Teaching Award, in 1962,[12] and the Society of American Law Teachers Teaching Award.[1]
In 1999, the Boalt Hall Women's Association created a fellowship in Kay's name to support students pursuing "public interest work benefiting women."[14]
Berkeley established the Herma Hill Kay Memorial Lecture series; the inaugural speaker was U.S. Supreme Court Justice (and friend of Kay's) Ruth Bader Ginsburg.[15]
