Herma Hill Kay, who pushed for the rights of women and minorities as the first female dean of the University of California at Berkeley’s law school, died on June 10 at her home in San Francisco. She was 82.

Her death was confirmed by her son Michael Brodsky.

When Ms. Kay became the second woman to join Berkeley’s law faculty in 1960, law schools were still very much a boys’ club; The New York Times reported in 1992 that only 13 women had been professors in accredited law schools in the United States since the first woman was hired in that position in 1919. Ms. Kay made it her mission to open the clubhouse without tearing it down.

“How to make trouble without being a troublemaker, that describes my style,” Ms. Kay said in 1992, after she was named dean at Berkeley Law School. “I think that if you are going to help build an institution, you have to be careful not to destroy it in the process.”

An expert on family law, marital property law and sex-based discrimination, Ms. Kay helped draft California’s no-fault divorce law in 1969. She was also one of the authors of the Uniform Marriage and Divorce Act, a standard for national no-fault divorce laws approved by National Conference of Commissioners on Uniform State Laws in 1970. Some form of no-fault divorce is now law in every state.