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.
In private practice, he “defended companies accused of being monopolies,” Chesa Boudin said in an interview, though Judge Boudin himself was a nephew of the independent journalist I.F. Stone, who exposed government scandals and the corporate-Defense Department nexus during the Vietnam War era and before.
Judge Boudin’s best known opinion dealt a critical blow to the Defense of Marriage Act, the Clinton-era law that defined marriage as between a man and a woman. In 2012, he and two other judges on the First Circuit court ruled that the law’s denial of federal benefits to same-sex couples was unjust.
The decision was narrow, and not necessarily an endorsement of same-sex marriage, but legal scholars considered it a significant step on the road to normalizing it. In his opinion, Judge Boudin wrote of his reservations about the law’s “effort to put a thumb on the scales and influence a state’s decision as to how to shape its own marriage laws.” The decision was upheld by the United States Supreme Court a year later.
The judge’s caution reflected his diverse professional antecedents: He had been a law clerk to Judge Henry J. Friendly, a conservative Republican, whom he revered; nominated to the federal bench by Senator Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts, a Democrat; and appointed by a Republican president, George H.W. Bush.
“He was pretty pragmatic and mainstream,” his nephew said. “He was an intellectual who brought his full brain power to the law.”
Where his parents’ salon in some ways epitomized the 1960s spirit of revolt and freedom, Judge Boudin had a rather strict view of duties and responsibilities to society. In 2007, for instance, he rebuked a lower court judge for sparing a drug trafficker from prison.
“Sentences with no (or trivial) prison time have been scrutinized severely on appellate review,” Judge Boudin wrote in his ruling, adding, “Even taking account of both cooperation and contrition, it is far from clear that adequate basis could be furnished for a near-zero prison sentence.”
Chesa Boudin said: “We’re all our own people. He got along very well with his father. He was very angry with his sister for what she did. She caused a tremendous amount of harm.”
Nonetheless, he added, during Ms. Boudin’s years at Bedford Hills Correctional Facility in Westchester County, N.Y. — she was released in 2003 — Judge Boudin would occasionally visit her. “He cared about her well-being, but he was a disappointed older brother,” Chesa Boudin said.
Ms. Boudin, who died in 2022 at 78, first achieved public notoriety in March 1970, when the Greenwich Village townhouse where she was living blew up. Her colleagues had set up a makeshift bomb factory there; three were killed on the spot, and Ms. Boudin, who had been showering, had to scramble away half-naked.
Her brother, meanwhile, was immersed in his corporate law firm. “While Michael was making partner at Covington & Burling, Kathy was making bombs in Greenwich Village,” David Margolick wrote in a 1992 profile of Michael Boudin in The New York Times.
On Monday, his colleagues on the bench celebrated his intellectual acuity and devotion to the law.
“Judge Michael Boudin was one of the greatest federal judges of his generation, known and widely respected for his brilliance and wisdom,” Judge Sandra L. Lynch, a former First Circuit chief judge, wrote in a news release. “His work embodied the virtues of judicial restraint and showed extraordinary mastery of the doctrines undergirding the Constitution.”
Michael Boudin was born in Manhattan on Nov. 29, 1939. His mother was Jean (Roisman) Boudin, who was the sister of I.F. Stone’s wife, Esther Stone.
Michael attended Elisabeth Irwin High School in Manhattan and graduated from Harvard College in 1961 with a bachelor’s degree. He was president of the Harvard Law Review and graduated from Harvard Law School in 1964.
He was a clerk to Judge Friendly, of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, covering New York, Connecticut and Vermont, from 1964 to 1965, and clerk to Justice John Harlan of the Supreme Court from 1965 to 1966. He joined Covington & Burling that year, and in 1987 became deputy assistant attorney general in the Antitrust Division of the Department of Justice until 1990.
He was appointed that year to the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, where he served until 1992, when he was appointed to the circuit court.
Apart from his nephew, Judge Boudin is survived by his wife, Martha A. Field, a Harvard Law professor, from whom he was separated.
Judge Boudin was not keen on interviews. But Mr. Margolick, in his 1992 Times article, cited a questionnaire the judge had filled out for the Senate Judiciary Committee when it was considering his nomination. “He described the tenets of his judicial thinking: self-discipline in defining and exercising authority, particularly over statutes, but vigilance where constitutional rights are concerned,” Mr. Margolick wrote.
In a tribute on Monday, Judge Boudin’s friend the retired Supreme Court justice Stephen Breyer wrote: “What Michael loved was to learn, through reading and discussion, about our nature — we human beings — how we lived together in societies. How we maintained our freedom.”