Judge Dixie Chastain, the first female University of Miami law school graduate and a Miami-Dade County juvenile judge for two decades, died Sunday at 100.

Her daughter, Dixie Lemons, said she expired ``very peacefully'' at home in Miami.

Chastain was Florida's sixth woman judge, appointed in 1965 to a newly created third seat on the county's Juvenile and Domestic Relations Court bench.

She became a circuit court judge by constitutional revision in 1976, retired two years later, then served until 1995 as a senior judge by special appointment.

Among her final rulings: ordering former Miami Dolphins star running back Eugene ``Mercury'' Morris to pay $10,000 in child support during a paternity case.

Chastain was a role model for the generation of female lawyers who followed, including Janet Reno, who has said that Chastain inspired her career choice.

Reno became the nation's first female attorney general in the Clinton administration.

She ``paved the way for me and made it seem possible,'' Reno said in a speech nine years ago. ``Dixie Herlong Chastain, when I was 7 years old, sat out under my rose apple tree on North Kendall Drive when it ended at 112th Avenue, and made me able to say to my mother, `Yes, I can become a lawyer because Dixie Chastain is a lawyer.' ''

Active in civic affairs, Chastain belonged to the Miami Woman's Club and the Everglades Chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution, and served as a deacon at Central Baptist Church.

Born Dixie Louese Herlong in the southwestern Alabama town of Manistee -- once a thriving lumber community, now just a dot on maps -- she grew up in Princeton, north of Homestead.

Her mother, Edie, ``would drive a school bus, which was actually a trailer pulled behind a model T Ford, to transport children . . . to the new school, called Redland Farmlife School,'' one of Chastain's 12 great-grandchildren, Amanda Louese Jones, noted in a 2004 college paper.

The family moved north to the city of Miami in 1918.

Edie and James Herlong wanted their two daughters to attend college after graduating from the original Miami Senior High School, a radical notion in 1925.

Chastain told her great-granddaughter that she would only consider a career in law or medicine -- not the womanly occupations of nursing, teaching or office work.

``I got sick at the sight of blood,'' she said, ``so I knew I couldn't be a doctor. That left me to ba a lawyer.''

She spent a year at Stetson University before enrolling at the newly founded University of Miami just after the killer hurricane of 1926, one of 560 original students.

She studied international and aviation law at UM's law school, and in 1930 became the youngest woman admitted to the Florida Bar, she told her great-granddaughter.

Not only did Chastain have to deal with workplace sexism when interviewing at law firms, but the Great Depression made jobs scarce.

She ended up as secretary to a justice of the peace.

But in February 1933, when would-be presidential assassin Giuesppe Zangara tried to shoot Franklin D. Roosevelt in Miami's Bayfront Park -- hitting Chicago Mayor Anton Cermak, who later died of his wounds -- Chastain was brought in to take down his statements.

About the same time, Dixie Herlong met a handsome young Georgia-born constable named Reginald Bryan Chastain. They married in August 1935.