General
Michael Boudin, Independent Judge From a Family on the Left, Dies at 85
His rulings on the U.S. bench might have rankled his father, a civil liberties lawyer; his uncle, a muckraking journalist; and his sister, an imprisoned radical.
Michael Boudin, a federal appeals court judge who was a scion of one of America’s best-known leftist families but who forged an independent path on the bench, died on Monday in Boston. He was 85.
His death, in a memory care facility, resulted from complications of dementia and Parkinson’s disease, said his nephew Chesa Boudin, the former district attorney of San Francisco.
Judge Boudin — the chief judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit, which covers most of New England and Puerto Rico, from 2001 to 2008 — was the odd man out in a family devoted to left-leaning causes. A former corporate lawyer with Covington & Burling, where he worked for 21 years, he was the brother of Kathy Boudin, a member of the radical Weather Underground. She served 22 years in prison for her part in the 1981 holdup of a Brink’s armored truck in which two policeman and a guard were killed.
His father was Leonard B. Boudin, one of the most celebrated civil liberties lawyers of the 1950s, ’60s and ’70s, who took a public stand against McCarthyism and whose clients included Daniel Ellsberg, who leaked the Pentagon Papers, and the Rev. Philip Berrigan, the antiwar activist. His parents, in their Greenwich Village home, hosted a salon for fellow liberals and leftists.
And as San Francisco’s district attorney, Chesa Boudin, Kathy Boudin’s son, became known for his efforts to cut down on incarcerations and his intolerance of police brutality. To conservatives, he became a symbol of progressive overreach and served less than three years, before a recall election ended his tenure in 2022.
Judge Boudin was not easy to pigeonhole ideologically.
On the bench, he once concurred in a ruling against affirmative action at Boston Latin School — a conservative position that might have rankled his father.
