Chesa Boudin

Early life and family history

Boudin was born in New York City. His parents, Kathy Boudin and David Gilbert, were Weather Underground members.

When Boudin was 14 months old, his parents were arrested for their role as getaway car drivers in the Brink's robbery of 1981 in Rockland County, New York. His mother was sentenced to 20 years to life and his father to 75 years to life for the felony murders of two police officers and a security guard. After his parents were incarcerated, Boudin was raised by "adoptive parents" Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn, who, like his parents, were one-time members of the Weather Underground. Kathy Boudin was released under parole supervision in 2003.

Boudin descends from a long left-wing lineage. His great-great-uncle, Louis B. Boudin, was a Marxist theoretician and author of a two-volume history of the Supreme Court's influence on American government, and his grandfather, Leonard Boudin, was an attorney who represented controversial clients such as Fidel Castro and Paul Robeson. Boudin is also related to Michael Boudin, a judge on the United States Court of Appeals for the First Circuit, and I.F. Stone, an independent journalist.

Education

Boudin graduated from the University of Chicago Laboratory Schools in 1999. In 2003, he graduated from Yale University with a B.A. in History. He spent his junior year abroad at the University of Chile in Santiago, Chile funded by a Rotary International Ambassadorial Scholarship.

Boudin went to Oxford University on a 2003 Rhodes Scholarship. At Oxford, he earned two master's degrees, one in Forced Migration and the other in Public Policy in Latin America. He graduated from Yale Law School in 2011.

Law

After law school, Boudin clerked on the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit for M. Margaret McKeown. He was a 2012–2013 Liman Fellow at the San Francisco Public Defender. In January 2015, he began working full-time at the San Francisco Public Defender's Office.

As a public defender, Boudin has been a leader of bail reform efforts, including in 2015 initiating a federal class action lawsuit alleging San Francisco's use of money bail to determine pretrial custody status violates equal protection and due process. The lawsuit led the City of San Francisco to concede that the practice of jailing indigent defendants based on inability to pay money bail is unconstitutional. Boudin also served on an ACLU advisory committee to help draft state-wide bail reform legislation. Boudin speaks and publishes frequently on criminal justice issues, particularly bail reform. Boudin is on the board of Civil Rights Corps.

Lecturer

He lectures in English and Spanish internationally on topics including the criminal justice system, impact of parental incarceration, and Latin American politics. He has contributed to The Nation magazine and other periodicals.

Writer

Boudin translated Understanding the Bolivarian Revolution: Hugo Chavez Speaks with Marta Harnecker into English (Monthly Review Press, 2005), co-edited Letters From Young Activists: Today's Young Rebels Speak Out, (Nation Books, 2005), and co-wrote The Venezuelan Revolution: 100 Questions – 100 Answers (Thunder's Mouth Press, 2006). His latest book, Gringo: A Coming of Age in Latin America, was released in April 2009 from Scribner, an imprint of Simon & Schuster. The book received reviews in several national papers including the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the San Francisco Chronicle. The Times wrote that Boudin's "prose sounds more than anything like a college admissions essay" that "belongs in a yoga magazine, not between hard covers." The Post called the book a "mind-numbing rant" with "nothing passionate, incandescent or even remotely revelatory." According to the review, the "typically uninspired" book "reveals a remarkable lack of sophistication, both as an argument against free-market imperialism and as a work of travel journalism."

More recently, he authored a range of scholarly articles published in law journals such as the Yale Law Journal, on disclosure in elections under the First Amendment, Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology on the rights of children with incarcerated parents, Harvard Latino Law Review on immigrant labor organizing, and others.