On October 21, 2019, Berkeley Law proudly hosted the inaugural Herma Hill Kay Memorial Lecture, featuring U.S. Supreme Court Associate Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, in conversation with Professor Amanda Tyler. Read more about the event.
Justice Ginsburg Livestream - October 21 at 4:00pm
The Event
Introduction
Erwin Chemerinsky
Dean, Jesse H. Choper Distinguished Professor of Law, UC Berkeley School of Law
Welcome
Carol Christ
Chancellor, University of California, Berkeley
Reflections on Herma Hill Kay
Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg
Pamela Samuelson
Richard M. Sherman Distinguished Professor of Law and Information; Co-Director, Berkeley Center for Law & Technology, UC Berkeley School of Law
Conversation
Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg with
Amanda Tyler
Shannon C. Turner Professor of Law, UC Berkeley School of Law
The Speakers
RUTH BADER GINSBURG
Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States
Ruth Bader Ginsburg was born in Brooklyn, New York, March 15, 1933. She married Martin D. Ginsburg in 1954, and has a daughter, Jane, and a son, James. She received her B.A. from Cornell University, attended Harvard Law School, and received her LL.B. from Columbia Law School. She served as a law clerk to the Honorable Edmund L. Palmieri, Judge of the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York, from 1959–1961. From 1961–1963, she was a research associate and then associate director of the Columbia Law School Project on International Procedure. She was a Professor of Law at Rutgers University School of Law from 1963–1972, and Columbia Law School from 1972–1980, and a fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences in Stanford, California from 1977–1978. In 1971, she co-founded the Women’s Rights Project of the American Civil Liberties Union, and served as the ACLU’s General Counsel from 1973–1980, and on the National Board of Directors from 1974–1980. She served on the Board and Executive Committee of the American Bar Foundation from 1979-1989, on the Board of Editors of the American Bar Association Journal from 1972-1978, and on the Council of the American Law Institute from 1978-1993. She was appointed a Judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit in 1980. President Clinton nominated her as an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court, and she took her seat August 10, 1993.
AMANDA TYLER
Shannon C. Turner Professor of Law, UC Berkeley School of Law
Amanda L. Tyler joined the Berkeley Law faculty in 2011, where she teaches and writes about the Supreme Court, the federal courts, constitutional law, and civil procedure. Tyler has been a visiting professor at Harvard Law School, the University of Virginia School of Law, and New York University School of Law. In 2017, she was a Visiting Senior Fellow in the Law Department of the London School of Economics. Tyler is the author of numerous articles and book chapters and the book Habeas Corpus in Wartime: From the Tower of London to Guantanamo Bay (Oxford University Press 2017). She is also a co-editor of Hart and Wechsler’s The Federal Courts and the Federal System (Foundation Press). Tyler is an elected member of the American Law Institute, a past Order of the Coif Distinguished Visitor, and a past Chair of the Federal Courts Section of the American Association of Law Schools. She holds a degree in Public Policy, with honors and distinction, from Stanford University, and a J.D., magna cum laude, from Harvard Law School, where she served as Treasurer of Volume 111 of the Harvard Law Review. Following law school, Tyler served as a law clerk to the Honorable Guido Calabresi at the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit and the Honorable Ruth Bader Ginsburg at the Supreme Court of the United States. A former college soccer player, Tyler has run 10 Boston marathons.
PAMELA SAMUELSON
Richard M. Sherman Distinguished Professor of Law and Information; Co-Director, Berkeley Center for Law & Technology, UC Berkeley School of Law
Pamela Samuelson has written and spoken extensively about the challenges that new information technologies pose for traditional legal regimes, especially for intellectual property law. She is a member of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), a Contributing Editor of Communications of the ACM, a past Fellow of the John D. & Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, and an Honorary Professor of the University of Amsterdam. She is a co-founder and chair of the Board of Directors of the Authors Alliance, a nonprofit whose mission is to facilitate authorship in the public interest. She is also chair of the Board of Directors of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, as well as a Fellow of the Center for Democracy & Technology, and a member of the Advisory Boards for Public Knowledge and the Electronic Privacy Information Center.
About the Herma Hill Kay Memorial Lecture
The Herma Hill Kay Memorial Lecture was created by a generous seed gift from Professor Pamela Samuelson and her husband Dr. Robert Glushko. The annual lecture honors the iconic pioneer who taught at Berkeley Law for 57 years and was its first female dean. She died in 2017 at age 82.
Herma Hill Kay was a Berkeley Law institution. A beloved, iconic pioneer among women in the law, she taught here for 57 years and was our first woman dean. The school’s second woman faculty member, Herma became a popular professor and renowned scholar of family law, conflicts of law, and sex-based discrimination. A powerful advocate for diversity in legal education and women’s rights, she published numerous articles and book chapters on divorce, adoption, and reproductive rights.
Kay co-authored the 1969 California Family Law Act and the Uniform Marriage and Divorce Act—now the national standard for no-fault divorce. In 1974, she co-authored the seminal Sex-based Discrimination casebook, now in its seventh edition, with U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Professor Kenneth Davidson.
While Kay was dean from 1992-2000, Berkeley Law faced severe budget restrictions and a 1996 state law barring affirmative action in recruiting. Yet the school thrived with major expansions to its curriculum, faculty, and clinical program. In 1998, the National Law Journal named Kay one of America’s 50 most influential female lawyers.
A South Carolina native, Kay graduated from Southern Methodist University and earned her JD at the University of Chicago. She came to Berkeley after clerking for California Supreme Court Justice Roger Traynor ’27. She won countless awards for her teaching, scholarship, and service, and her many leadership positions included stints at the Association of American Law Schools (president) and UC Berkeley Academic Senate (chair).
“Herma will be remembered for her contributions to family law, and to the broader representation of women in the legal community,” Samuelson says. “But she also inspired me to believe that women can do anything, and that’s the thing I prize the most. You should honor the people who are your pioneers.”