Craig M. Boise

Professor of Law (315) 443-9580 cmboise@syr.edu

Craig M. Boise became the 12th Dean and Professor of Law at Syracuse University College of Law in July 2016, where he continued to build a reputation as one of legal education’s leading innovators. Professor Boise concluded his deanship of the College of Law on June 30, 2024.

During his thirteen years as a law school dean, he established the nation’s first online J.D. program to utilize a virtual classroom; the first online joint J.D./M.B.A. program; the nation’s only joint J.D./LL.M in advocacy law; 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, Boise was Dean and Joseph C. Hostetler-BakerHostetler Chair in Law at Cleveland State University 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 where he began his academic career, and was a visiting professor at Washington & Lee College of Law.

Boise 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.

Before beginning his academic career, Boise practiced tax law for nearly nine 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.

From 2020 to 2023, Boise was a member of the Council of the ABA Section on Legal Education and Admissions to the Bar, which accredits all U.S. law schools; and on its Standards Review Committee from 2013 to 2018. He was an inaugural member of the Advisory Council of the ABA’s Legal Education Police Practices Consortium, founded in 2020 to promote better policing practices throughout the U.S.; is one of four members of the applicant screening committee for the New York Board of Law Examiners; and is a member of the Independent Review Committee of the New York State Commission on Ethics and Lobbying in Government. He previously served on the Steering Committee of the AALS’s Deans’ Forum, and as co-chair of the Executive Committee of the AALS’s Deans’ Section.

In 2018, Boise served as Co-Chair of the transition team for New York Attorney General Letitia 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. He has been admitted to the practice of law in Missouri, New York, and Ohio.