News Release

Photo note: See URL below to download a photo of Boger.

Boger named School of Law dean

CHAPEL HILL - John Charles "Jack" Boger, an alumnus and longtime professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill School of Law, has been tapped to become the school's next dean.

Chancellor James Moeser today (June 7) announced the choice of Boger, currently Wade Edwards distinguished professor of law and deputy director of the Center for Civil Rights at UNC. His appointment as the School of Law's ninth dean, effective July 1, has been approved by the UNC Board of Trustees.

"Jack Boger brings the love of an alumnus, as well as the broad experiences of a 16-year faculty member and devoted civil rights champion to the deanship," Moeser said. "He has demonstrated superb leadership skills and an admirable passion for public service that is such an important value to celebrate at a leading public university's law school. Jack is exceptionally well qualified to energize a talented student body, world-class faculty, devoted staff and loyal alumni."

As part of the national search process, chaired by School of Government Dean Mike Smith, the university has carefully evaluated the current level of support it provides to the law school. Concurrent with Boger's appointment as dean, the university has developed a new funding plan to enhance the school's capacity to sustain and develop future excellence and world-class programs, Moeser said.

The university's commitment, totaling nearly $2 million in recurring funds, addresses the school's need for resources including faculty positions, funding for support staff and students as well as quality space. Details include the following:

• More than $1.3 million to increase the number of tenure-track faculty to 55, up from the current 45 that includes five vacant positions, over the next three to five years. Includes funds available in July for one immediate new hire.
  
• $600,000 for staff positions to support faculty scholarship and teaching.
  
• $150,000 in recurring funding over the next two years to meet the financial aid needs of qualified students as the school prepares to bolster private fund-raising efforts to support this priority.
  
• Launching a study of future space needs to be completed by December 2006 with a university commitment to support law school expansion as needed.

"This additional commitment to the school, combined with Jack Boger's selection as dean, demonstrates the university's unwavering pledge of support for a professional school that has been so important throughout the university's history," Moeser said. "Furthermore, it will ensure that the School of Law will continue to be a rich source of knowledge and expertise for the people of North Carolina and beyond in the future."

Boger will succeed Interim Dean Charles Daye. Daye took over the temporary post from Gail B. Agrawal, who becomes the University of Kansas law school dean on July 1. The UNC deanship became vacant last year when Gene Nichol was named president of the College of William and Mary.

Boger will lead one of America's finest law schools at a public university. The school's 9,370 alumni include governors, judges, business leaders, congressmen, U.S. senators, state and local officials and educators. Forty percent of all attorneys practicing in North Carolina are UNC School of Law alumni. Law alumni live and work in 97 of 100 North Carolina counties, in all 50 states and in 17 foreign countries. Four of the five most recent governors of North Carolina are Carolina law graduates, and of the 443 judges in North Carolina, 159 - 36 percent - are alumni.

Strengths of the school include a faculty with world-class scholars, award-winning teachers and noted scholars. The student body is among the most intellectually diverse in the nation. The school's programs in civil rights (which Boger has helped shape), as well as banking, intellectual property, entrepreneurial and securities law, critical studies, bankruptcy and constitutional inquiry, are considered among the nation's best. An extensive array of skills and capstone courses provide students with important links between theory and practice. Student-run pro bono efforts have earned national recognition. Joint-degree programs cover business, public policy, planning, social work and public administration. New foreign study, exchange and outreach efforts have helped internationalize the school's curriculum.

After joining the faculty of the UNC School of Law in 1990, Boger actively participated in North Carolina's school finance reform litigation, Leandro v. State, working with a team of lawyers on behalf of at-risk children. In 2002 he became deputy director of the UNC Center for Civil Rights, working with Director Julius L. Chambers to encourage innovative civil rights research, train a new generation of civil rights attorneys and address pressing civil rights issues in North Carolina and the Southeast.

A native of Concord, N.C., Boger was a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Duke University in 1968 and earned a master of divinity degree from Yale University in 1971. Three years later, he received his law degree from UNC, where he was associate editor of the North Carolina Law Review and earned Order of the Coif honors.

After completing law school, he clerked with the late Samuel Silverman, a justice with the New York Supreme Court Appellate Division and practiced for three years in the litigation department of Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison in New York City.

In 1978, Boger joined the staff of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People's Legal Defense and Educational Fund, where he litigated capital punishment cases for a decade, becoming in 1983 the director of the fund's Capital Punishment Project. In 1987, he became director of a poverty and justice program established at the fund to enlarge the legal rights of the minority poor.

While at the NAACP's fund, Boger became lead counsel in the early stages of Sheff v. O'Neil, a major challenge to the racial and economic isolation of the Hartford, Conn., public schools that went forward as a close collaboration among the Puerto Rican Legal Defense Fund, the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, the American Civil Liberties Union, the Connecticut Civil Liberties Union and numerous black and Latino parents and community groups throughout the city and in Connecticut.

Boger chairs the Poverty and Race Research Action Council, a Washington, D.C.-based federation of civil rights, civil liberties and legal services groups that encourages national coordination of social scientific research and legal advocacy on behalf of the poor.

Boger has taught and lectured on education law since 1994 and has written frequently on school finance and school desegregation issues. He has co-edited two books, "School Resegregation: Must the South Turn Back?" in 2005 and "Race, Poverty, and American Cities," with UNC Professor Judith Wegner, in 1996. Both were published by the UNC Press. His other writings have appeared in various legal and public policy publications and as book chapters. He has twice been awarded the law school's highest teaching award and has also received a campuswide teaching award for post-baccalaureate instruction.

Boger has taught as a lecturer or adjunct professor at Harvard, New York Law School and Florida State University. At UNC, he teaches constitutional law, education law, racial discrimination and poverty law.

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Photo URL: http://www.unc.edu/news/pics/faculty/boger_jack.jpg

University Relations Contact: Mike McFarland, (919) 962-8593, mike_mcfarland@unc.edu
School of Law Contact: Matt Marvin, (919) 919-962-4125, mmarvin@email.unc.edu