Milestones Oct. 10, 2005

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DIED. CONSTANCE BAKER MOTLEY, 84, trailblazing lawyer, New York State Senator and federal judge who, with her intricate knowledge of the law and unyielding persistence and elegance, helped fight, and often win, many of the most significant civil rights battles in U.S. history; in New York City. The first black woman appointed to the federal bench, by Lyndon Johnson in 1966, she received funds for college after a local philanthropist, Clarence Blakeslee, heard the then teenager speak at a community center. As a young lawyer for the N.A.A.C.P. Legal Defense and Educational Fund, where she worked for two decades, she assisted Thurgood Marshall in preparing the landmark school-desegregation case Brown v. Board of Education and, following that 1954 ruling, took on what she called the "second civil war." Of the 10 school-desegregation cases she argued before the Supreme Court, she won nine, among them James Meredith's fight to attend the University of Mississippi--a victory that rocked not just Ole Miss but also a state well known for its intractable racism. Later, in a high-profile 1978 decision as a U.S. judge, she ruled that female sports reporters be given access to major league baseball players' locker rooms.

DIED. LEO STERNBACH, 97, chemist and inventor of the widely used antianxiety drug Valium; at home in Chapel Hill, N.C. Born in Austria and educated in Poland, he began his career with Hoffmann-La Roche Inc. in Switzerland before coming to the U.S. Sternbach collected 241 patents in his career; he also developed the tranquilizer Librium, the sleeping pill Mogadon, Klonopin for epileptic seizures and Arfonad to control bleeding during surgery.

DIED. URIE BRONFENBRENNER, 88, psychologist whose theory, which he dubbed the "ecology of human development" and is now called bioecology, changed the perception of the necessary factors for a child's development; in Ithaca, N.Y. With his belief that growth was informed not just by psychological factors but also by social, economic, political and cultural ones, he was instrumental in founding the U.S. school-readiness program Head Start, which since the 1960s has served 20 million children and families.

By Melissa August, Harriet Barovick, Elizabeth L. Bland and Clayton Neuman