Herma Hill Kay was born on August 18, 1934 in Orangeburg, South Carolina. She received a bachelor's degree in English from Southern Methodist University in Dallas in 1956 and a law degree from the University of Chicago in 1959. She clerked for Justice Roger Traynor of the California Supreme Court before starting her tenure at Berkeley Law School in 1960. She was only the second woman to join Berkeley's law faculty.
She was an expert on family law, marital property law, and sex-based discrimination. She helped draft California's no-fault divorce law and the Uniform Marriage and Divorce Act. She wrote articles on the history of women in the legal profession and seminal books of case law including Sex-Based Discrimination written with Kenneth Davidson and Ruth Bader Ginsburg. In 1992, she became the first female dean of Berkeley Law School. She was dean until 1999 when she decided to return to teaching. She retired from teaching in 2016. She died on June 10, 2017 at the age of 82.
030