Barbara Aronstein Black, a legal historian who achieved a milestone as the first woman to lead an Ivy League law school, at Columbia University, died on Tuesday in Philadelphia. She was 92.
Her death was confirmed by Kara D.V. Avanceña, a spokeswoman for Columbia Law School, where Ms. Black was dean from 1986 to 1991.
It would take 17 years after that before another woman, the future Supreme Court justice Elena Kagan, followed in Professor Black’s footsteps and became dean of Harvard Law School.
As dean, Professor Black, a scholar of law in colonial America, influenced curricular reform, bolstered Columbia’s corporate law program and revamped the school’s reputation as a cutthroat institution. She also brought more women and people of color onto the faculty, adopted a maternal leave policy and introduced a part-time program for mothers.
“Would this have happened without a woman in the deanship? Yes, it would have,” she said in a series of oral history interviews with the American Bar Association in 2006. “Did it happen sooner because there was a woman in the deanship? Yes, I think so.”
Gillian Lester, who stepped down as dean of Columbia Law in 2024 after nine years in the post, said Professor Black was a brilliant legal historian and generous colleague who had carried her achievements lightly.
“The stories she told of her life and career underplayed her many accomplishments and the significance of her trailblazing role,” Professor Lester said in an email for this obituary in 2022. “They were funny, sometimes barbed, often self-deprecating. But, of course, her importance as a leader, and as a woman in a man’s world, can’t be overstated.”
Professor Black said she was taken aback by what she called a “circuitous path” to the top of one of the country’s most elite institutions.
After completing a law degree and a teaching fellowship at Columbia in 1956, she left academia to raise her three children and help her ailing mother in New Haven, Conn., where Professor Black’s husband, the constitutional law scholar Charles L. Black Jr., had taken a position at Yale Law School. He had been teaching at Columbia.
“I was pretty much a traditional mom,” she said in one of the oral history interviews. “By the time I realized that staying home with the kids was not going to be enough for me, I was in something of a pickle because there were no academic jobs for me.”
She re-entered the academic world and completed her Ph.D. in history at Yale nearly two decades after she graduated from law school. She took her first professorial position at Yale in 1976 and was nearly 51 when the university offered her tenure, an offer she ultimately turned down to accept a position at Columbia.
In a front-page article in 1986, under a headline proclaiming “Columbia Picks Woman as Law School Dean,” Professor Black told The New York Times, “I really do believe that where I am today has everything to do with the years that I spent hanging on to a career by my fingernails.”
Barbara Aronstein was born on May 6, 1933, in the Borough Park section of Brooklyn. Her father, Robert Aronstein, was a lawyer who had largely dissuaded her mother, Minnie (Polenberg) Aronstein, from working outside the home, Professor Black said in the oral history.
A young Ms. Aronstein graduated from New Utrecht High School and earned a bachelor’s degree in 1953 from Brooklyn College.
When she entered Columbia Law, women made up just 15 percent of her class. The handful of female students at the school, she wrote in a 2002 article in the Columbia Law Review, did not make “so much as a dent in the essential maleness of the law school culture, or disturb the web of assumption that underlay the belief system.”
She met her future husband in his Columbia course on equity in law. They married in 1954.
Professor Black graduated in 1955 and worked as a teaching fellow at Columbia Law the following academic year.
She earned her doctorate in history from Yale in 1975 and took a position as an assistant professor of history at the university the next year. She became one of two women on Yale’s law faculty when she was appointed an associate professor in 1979.
Professor Black joined the Columbia Law faculty as the George Welwood Murray Professor of Legal History in 1984 and was offered the deanship less than two years later.
But when a colleague told her that she had been chosen as a consensus candidate, she recalled, “I just laughed and laughed” in disbelief, she said in the oral history. “And I couldn’t stop myself. I thought it was the funniest thing I had ever heard.”
She said she had accepted the post for various reasons: the satisfaction of her ego; the prospect of self-fulfillment; the message of encouragement her appointment would send to other women; and a sense of responsibility to the colleagues who had suggested her for the job.
She was credited with enrolling more female students and reimagining the first-year course of study, although her efforts to renovate and expand Columbia’s law school building were less successful. A renovation project that had been initiated under her predecessor was scuttled as the university abandoned plans for a larger campus overhaul.
Years after she stepped down, a renovation was ultimately completed, in the late 1990s. Professor Black later blamed her “lack of experience and relative lack of sophistication” for the project’s initial failure, adding that, in retrospect, she should have secured clearer promises from the university.
After completing her term as dean in 1991, she returned to full-time teaching, research and writing. She retired in 2008.
Her husband died in 2001. She is survived by their two sons, Gavin and David; their daughter, Robin; and five grandchildren.
Professor Black never forgot the quirky timetable of her own successful career. In a 1988 commencement speech at Brooklyn College, she counseled young graduates not to panic if their goals weren’t immediately realized.
“Don’t be discouraged when you find that the process of self-discovery takes a long, long time,” she said. “Don’t even be surprised if at 50 you are still wondering what you are going to be when you grow up.”
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