Until December 2008, Kaye served as chief judge of the State of New York Court of Appeals, the highest court in New York. She was the first woman to hold the position.

Judith A. Smith was born in Monticello, NY and skipped two grades of high school before enrolling at Barnard. She went to work at a local newspaper after graduation and had ambitions to be a political reporter; when she found herself assigned to the paper's society page, she returned to school at NYU Law. Following a two-year stint as an associate at Sullivan & Cromwell, Kaye worked at Olwine Connelly Chase O'Donnell & Weyher, a Midtown law firm where she concentrated on commercial litigation and became the first female partner in the firm's history. In 1983, then-Governor Mario Cuomo appointed her to the Court of Appeals. A somewhat surprising pick at the time—Kaye was a relative unknown and didn't have deep political ties—she quickly impressed her colleagues on the job. After Chief Justice Sol Wachtler was arrested for harassing his former mistress, Cuomo tapped Kaye replace him in 1993. In March 2007, a newly-elected Spitzer reappointed her to another 14-term—a first in the court's history. Kaye says she took the unusual step of applying for reappointment as a favor to Spitzer, as she didn't want to saddle the brand-new governor with the job of finding a replacement right after taking office. She retired from the court at the end of 2008 just after turning 70, the mandatory retirement age for New York's state judges.

Kaye built a reputation as a reformer. During her career, she challenged the state over public school expenditures and campaigned for restructuring the court system and upgrading New York's town and village courts. She also pressed for changes to the state's Rockefeller drug laws, and in 2000 ordered New York courts to start offering nonviolent, drug-addicted criminals treatment in lieu of jail time (making it the first state in the nation to adopt the approach). Among her notable recent decisions on the bench: In 2004, she ruled that the death penalty was unconstitutional (siding with the court's majority) and in 2006 she ruled that gay marriage should be legal (siding with the court's minority). In April 2007, Kaye vocally demanded that the state increase judges' salaries and threatened to sue if pay raises weren't approved. [Image via Getty]