Distinguished professor of law and Judge Frederick Lacey Scholar ( property, First Amendment, sexual orientation and the law)

Professor Ball's latest book, Same-Sex Marriage and Children: A Tale of History, Social Science, and Law, will be published by the Oxford University Press in 2014. Professor Ball is also the author of The Right to be Parents: LGBT Families and the Transformation of Parenthood (NYU Press, 2012); From the Closet to the Courtroom: Five LGBT Rights Cases That Have Changed Our Nation (Beacon, 2010); and The Morality of Gay Rights: An Exploration in Political Philosophy (Routledge, 2003). In addition, he is a co-editor of Cases and Materials on Sexual Orientation and the Law (West, 5th edition, 2014).

Professor Ball is a frequent speaker at conferences and symposia. In the last few years, he has presented papers at the annual meetings of the Association of American Law Schools, Law and Society, the American Philosophical Association, and the American Political Science Association. During that time, he has also presented his scholarship at the Colorado, Columbia, Emory, Fordham, Harvard, Georgetown, Minnesota, NYU, UCLA, Virginia, and William and Mary law schools, among others.

His writings have appeared in the Cornell Law Review, the Columbia Journal of Gender and the Law, the Georgetown Law Journal, the Harvard Journal of Law and Gender, the Minnesota Law Review, the North Carolina Law Review, the UCLA Law Review, and the William and Mary Law Review, among others.

Professor Ball received his B.A. summa cum laude from Tufts University; his J.D. from Columbia Law School, where he was a Kent Scholar and the book reviews editor of the Columbia Law Review; and his LL.M. from Cambridge University, where he was awarded a "First." He clerked for Chief Justice Paul Liacos of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court and worked as a lawyer for the Legal Aid Society in New York City in the early 1990s. He joined the law school in 2008 after teaching at the University of Illinois College of Law for eight years and at the Penn State School of Law for five.