Rate My Professor Michael Boucai

Michael Boucai is a Professor in the School of Law at the University at Buffalo, where he joined the faculty as an Associate Professor in 2012 and was promoted to full Professor in 2020. He teaches Criminal Law and Family Law, as well as courses on legal history, gender, sexuality, and reproduction. Boucai holds a B.A. in History from Yale University (2002, cum laude with distinction in major), for which he received the Edwin Small Prize for his senior thesis on the 1977 Miami-Dade County gay rights referendum; a J.D. from Georgetown University Law Center (2005, Public Interest Law Scholar); and an M.Phil. in History from the University of Cambridge (2009), with a thesis entitled "Oscar Wilde, the Novel Teleny, and the Closet in Late-Victorian Britain."

Prior to UB Law, Boucai was the Sears Law Teaching Fellow at the Williams Institute at UCLA School of Law (2010–2012), clerked for the Honorable Rosemary Barkett on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit (2006), and served as an associate at Kasowitz Benson Torres & Friedman LLP in New York (2007–2008). His scholarship draws on law alongside history, psychology, and sociology to examine gender and sexuality, family law, constitutional law, criminal law, and legal history, including the constitutional history of marriage, the gay closet, and LGBT access to marriage and parenthood. Prominent publications include "Glorious Precedents: When Gay Marriage Was Radical" (Yale Journal of Law & the Humanities, 2015; recipient of the 2016 Michael Cunningham Prize, one of the Dukeminier Awards); "Is Assisted Procreation an LGBT Right?" (Wisconsin Law Review, 2016); "Before Loving: The Origins of the Right to Marry" (Utah Law Review, 2020); "Topology of the Closet" (Journal of Homosexuality, 2021); and "Talking about Talking about Surrogacy" (Buffalo Law Review, 2023). Boucai received the National LGBT Bar Association's Best LGBT Lawyers Under 40 award in 2017.

Boucai serves as Director of the Family Law Concentration (since 2019, co-directed 2019–2022), chairs committees such as Bylaws and previously Admissions (2016–2018) and Diversity, Equity, & Inclusion (2020), and moderates panels and delivers lectures on marriage equality, reproductive rights, and LGBTQ+ issues.