Shirley Hufstedler was a tiny woman, but in every other way she was a giant—intellectually, legally, morally. She was a feminist legal pioneer. One of only two female graduates of the Stanford Law School class of 1949, she became in 1961 the only woman among 120 California state trial judges and in 1966 became one of two women on the California Court of Appeal. When she was appointed to the Ninth Circuit in 1968, she became the only female federal appellate judge in the nation and only the second woman ever to serve as a federal appellate judge. In 1979 she was appointed by President Carter to be the first Secretary of Education. It’s fitting that her hobby was trekking in the Himalayas.