Amanda Tyler, UC Berkeley School of Law and Associate Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg United States Supreme Court (Photo: Courtesy Photo) Amanda Tyler, UC Berkeley School of Law and Associate Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg United States Supreme Court (Courtesy photo)

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg on Monday paid tribute to Herma Hill Kay, her longtime friend and former dean at The University of California, Berkeley School of Law who died in 2017, by speaking on campus as the inaugural lecturer in a series named in Kay's honor.

Ginsburg, who met Kay at a conference on women and the law at Yale Law School in 1971, said that shortly thereafter Kay became her "best and dearest working colleague." The two co-authored a 1974 casebook on sex discrimination, and Kay testified at Ginsburg's 1993 confirmation hearing for her post on the U.S. Supreme Court while she was serving as Berkeley Law dean.

Ginsburg used the occasion to encourage officials at the school to publish a history of women in legal education that Kay had been working on for 25 years at the time of her death. Ginsburg said that she wrote the introduction for Kay's book in August 2015 and that she looked forward to seeing it in print soon. Without her friend Kay, Ginsburg said, "we would scarcely understand how women altered legal education and the law itself."

Ginsburg spoke in front of an adoring crowd of mostly law students and professors at Zellerbach Hall, a nearly 2,700-seat theater on the UC Berkeley campus. The justice received a standing ovation before she said a word. After introductory remarks about Hill from Ginsburg and Berkeley Law professor Pamela Samuelson, a former student and mentee of Kay's whose donation helped spark the new speakers series, Ginsburg was interviewed on stage by another Berkeley Law professor, Amanda Tyler, who clerked for Ginsburg at the Supreme Court.

Tyler opened the discussion with a topic on many audience members' minds: Ginsburg's health. The 86-year-old justice underwent radiation treatment in August after a malignant tumor was found on her pancreas, marking her fourth bout with cancer in the last two decades.

"How are you?" Tyler asked.

"Compared to how I was six months ago," Ginsburg said, with a pause, "very well."

The rest of the conversation largely focused on Ginsburg's biography and steered clear of current politics or court goings-on.

Ginsburg's appearance comes just a month after her colleague, Justice Elena Kagan, appeared on the same Zellerbach Hall stage in conversation with Berkeley Law Dean Erwin Chemerinsky.

 

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