Dean, College of Law
Craig M. Boise became the 12th Dean and Professor of Law at Syracuse University College of Law in July 2016, where he has continued to build a reputation as one of legal education’s leading innovators. During his nearly ten years as a law school dean, he has established the nation’s first hybrid online J.D. program to utilize the now-ubiquitous Zoom platform, the first online joint J.D./M.B.A. program, one of the earliest Master of Legal Studies programs for non-lawyers, the nation’s first law-school based incubator for solo practitioners, and a “risk-free” J.D. program granting a master’s degree in law to students who complete their first year of law school but elect not to pursue a law career.
Before coming to Syracuse, Dean Boise was Dean and Joseph C. Hostetler-BakerHostetler Chair in Law at Cleveland State University’s Cleveland–Marshall College of Law. He has held faculty positions at DePaul University College of Law, where he was also Director of the Graduate Tax Program, and Case Western Reserve University School of Law, and was a visiting professor at Washington & Lee College of Law. He has taught a variety of tax courses, and his scholarship on US corporate and international tax policy and offshore financial centers has been published in the Texas International Law Journal, the George Mason Law Review, and the Minnesota Law Review, among others.
Preceding the commencement of his academic career, Dean Boise practiced tax law for more than eight years at Cleary Gottlieb LLP and Akin Gump LLP, in New York, and at Thompson Hine LLP, in Cleveland, OH. He clerked for the Hon. Pasco M. Bowman II, of the US Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit. Dean Boise earned his LL.M. in Taxation from NYU, his J.D. from the University of Chicago, and his bachelor’s degree in political science, summa cum laude, from the University of Missouri-Kansas City, where he also completed substantial coursework in piano performance at the university’s Conservatory of Music.
Dean Boise is a member of the Council of the ABA Section on Legal Education and Admission to the Bar and previously served on both the ABA’s Standards Review Committee and the Steering Committee of the AALS’s Deans’ Forum. He was an inaugural member of the Advisory Council of the Legal Education Police Practices Consortium, which was founded to promote better policing practices throughout the U.S. In 2018, he served as Co-Chair of the transition team for New York Attorney General Tish James. He is a past member of the New York State Judicial Institute on Professionalism in the Law and the New York State Bar Association’s COVID-19 Recovery Task Force and is admitted to the bar in New York and Ohio.