After her decade at home, she went back to work, initially part time. She jointly wrote a book about bail in the United States and served on several commissions to improve legal services and juvenile justice. In the beginning of that period, her youngest child was not yet in school, and she worked during his nap times and late at night. On weekends, she recalled, her husband took full responsibility for the children so that she could work without interruption.

She became a trial lawyer for the Legal Services Corporation and, after holding several other posts, was named assistant attorney general for legislative affairs by President Jimmy Carter, who later nominated her to the appeals court.

Harold Hongju Koh, a professor and former dean of Yale Law School, described Judge Wald as a vital figure in American law. “It’s hard to think of a more exuberant pioneer in this arena,” he said. She excelled as a judge both in the United States and abroad, he said, and “fought for human rights and civil liberties everywhere long after many activists would have laid down their pens.”

Patricia Ann McGowan was born on Sept. 16, 1928, in Torrington, Conn., the only child of Margaret O’Keefe and Joseph McGowan. In describing her childhood for oral history projects, she said she grew up in a crowded Irish-American household with an extended family of mostly women after her father left home when she was 2. While her mother and an aunt often worked as secretaries, the rest of the household revolved around episodic factory work at the Torrington Company, which manufactured sewing machine needles, among other things.

Her family, she said, took great pride in her academic success and made it clear that they did not expect her to end up on the factory floor. She went away to Connecticut College — it had offered her the greatest financial aid — but spent her summers on the assembly line back in Torrington greasing ball bearings and fabricating sewing needles. The workers were on strike during her last summer there, so she worked for the union.

Everyone at home would chip in, she said, to see that she had decent clothes for school. “At one point we had eight people in the house and only two were working, my grandfather and an aunt, and they were carrying the rest of us, as a family does,” Judge Wald said.