Michael Boucai

Michael Boucai teaches Criminal Law and Family Law, as well as courses on legal history, gender, sexuality, and reproduction. Drawing on a range of disciplines in addition to law, Boucai’s recent work has explored the constitutional history of marriage, the psychology and sociology of the gay closet, and LGBT-movement efforts to access and alter the institutions of marriage and parenthood. His most cited article, Glorious Precedents: When Gay Marriage Was Radical, examined three same-sex marriage cases brought in the years immediately after the Stonewall riots of 1969; the piece appeared in The Yale Journal of Law & the Humanities and was awarded the 2016 Michael Cunningham Prize, one of three Dukeminier Awards bestowed annually in recognition of the best legal scholarship on sexual orientation and gender identity. Boucai’s other writings have appeared in the Wisconsin Law Review, the Utah Law Review, the University of Miami Law Review, the San Diego Law Review, the National Black Law Journal, the Georgetown Journal of Gender and the Law, the Journal of Homosexuality, and the Journal of Social History.

Professor Boucai is a graduate of Yale (B.A., history), Georgetown (J.D.), and Cambridge (M.Phil, history). He clerked for the Honorable Rosemary Barkett on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit. Before joining the UB law faculty, he served as the Sears Law Teaching Fellow at the Williams Institute at UCLA School of Law.