Ellen Ash Peters, a legal trailblazer who was the first woman on the faculty of Yale Law School, the first female chief justice of the Connecticut Supreme Court, and who wrote a landmark civil rights decision in 1996 desegregating public schools in Hartford, died on April 17 at home in West Hartford. She was 94.

In her 18 years on the Connecticut court, Justice Peters wrote more than 600 opinions. In 1994, at a dinner to honor Justice Peters, Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg said that Justice Peters “gave generations of women law students a reason to believe they, too, could aspire and achieve.”