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This civil rights lawyer and former law school dean is known, regarded, and loved for his ‘wisdom and grace‘
This week, the N.C. Justice Center is honoring John Charles “Jack” Boger with its 2025 Lifetime Champion of Justice Award for “his immeasurable contributions to the state of North Carolina,” including his leadership to guarantee civil rights protections, quality schools, and racial and economic justice.
“All while preparing future generations to continue the fight,” says the invitation to the event.
Jack and I showed up at the UNC School of Law at the same time in 1990. He was teaching, and I was a 1L. Every time I see him, I remind him that he gave me my lowest grade in law school — wait for it — in education law.
It has been my honor to learn from him and lead with him. Back in the late 1990s, we and others co-authored the amicus brief in the Leandro case on behalf of students who were limited in English proficiency.
Jack’s early experience of the ‘racial divide’ in North Carolina
Jack grew up in the 1950s in Concord with a twin sister, according to his interview in 2023 for the Southern Oral History Project. At the time, Concord was what he calls “a little mill town” of about 16,000 people.
Jack is a local public school kid, attending Coltrane/Webb School in grades 1-2, Beverly Hill School in grades 3-6, Clara Harris School in grade 7, and Concord High School — home of the Fighting Spiders, he notes — in grades 8-12.
Early on, Jack noticed in his school and his community what he refers to as “the racial divide.”
“You read that everyone was supposed to be equal, child of God, and the rest, and yet it was clear during that time of rigid segregation that Black folks didn’t come downstairs in the movie theaters,” he says.
By middle school, it was troubling him. By ninth grade, he was writing essays about race, trying to make meaning of his world.
In hindsight, he says, he was “developing [a] sense that these issues mattered to me.”
“It was a very segregated world,” he says. “I didn’t have a lot of interracial contacts.”
In case you are wondering, we have all forgiven him for going next to Duke University for undergrad.
It was there, on Nov. 13, 1964, Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. gave a standing-room-only address about justice and civil rights, remembers Jack.
King challenged the audience to join in the work to address economic deprivation and social isolation, saying “we will be able to hew out of the mountain of despair a stone of hope; with this faith, we will be able to transform the jangling discord into a beautiful symphony of brotherhood.” You can listen to the address here.
“It was terribly moving to many of the students, including myself,” says Jack in the interview. On Dec. 10, 1964, King was presented with the Nobel Peace Prize.
Fast forward to April 1968. Jack was in his senior year, a religion major. He was attending a conference on the theology of hope when it was announced that King had been shot.
“The notion of the theology of hope … receded pretty quickly,” says Jack.
Along with others, he says “we started an effort to try to get the president of the university to acknowledge the role of all of us in this,” which led to a 1,600 person, four-day sit-in on the quad at Duke.
Jack was headed to Divinity School at Yale University after graduation from Duke. He had planned to be a minister, but the loss of King helped him realize “what I really wanted to do was civil rights work.”
He received a masters of divinity from Yale in 1971, and he graduated from the UNC School of Law in 1974.
Becoming a civil rights lawyer
After graduation, Jack worked in litigation for Paul, Weiss, Rifkin, Wharton & Garrison in New York City and clerked for Samuel Silverman, a justice on the N.Y. Supreme Court.
“The luckiest thing professionally that ever happened in my life,” says Jack, “is that one day I was found by the assigning partner … only to be working about 45 hours the couple of previous weeks. And he said, ‘You need another case, and we’ve got a pro-bono case from the NAACP Legal Defense Fund. It’s a death penalty case.’”
In 1978, Jack joined the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund (LDF), where over 12 years, he defended death row inmates, became the director of the LDF’s Capital Punishment Project, argued cases before the U.S. Supreme Court, and founded the LDF’s Poverty & Justice Project.
“I was referred, on the first month I was at work, to 18 different capital cases in eight different states with people calling saying, ‘What do we do now?’,” remembers Jack.
He says, “in 60 percent of the courts we went into, we were treated with surface cordiality, but that’s all,” sharing a story about a judge who allowed him to enter evidence, but said to him, “I’m never going to rule for you, no matter what your evidence is.”
Jack looked back through his old notebooks for this story:
In 1983, I took 22 overnight trips and was away 77 days. Seventy-seven is a big fraction of a year. And it’s not like that every time I was not away, I was at home, because we would write, I think we talked about it among ourselves, on average about 20 50-page [legal] briefs [or pleadings] a year. So, you’d write about one and a half [briefs] a month. And all the other stuff you’re doing, the telephone calls and the hearings and the [conferences] — you’re still writing a formal legal brief with footnotes and all the rest. Fifty pages’ worth, every two or three weeks. And getting those things in, and some of those were under stays of execution. In other words, a death sentence would be set for Jones, and you had to get something [filed] into a court that was credible enough that the court would say, ‘We’ve got to hold up that death, hold up that execution [pending further review of these papers],’ et cetera. So, it was a lot of, it was nonstop.
Jack Boger
How did Jack prepare for oral arguments before the U.S. Supreme Court?
“I went to our little church on Fridays or Saturday mornings sometime and stood in the pulpit, this little, tiny congregation of about 100 with nobody there, and would ask myself questions and answer questions for myself,” he says.
He would go to D.C. the night before the oral arguments, and he says on the way to meet with the clerk in the morning, he would think, “I’m not sure I can make it up the hill, I’m so nervous.”
But then, he says, “a moment would come, well before argument, and you’d think, ‘I’m really ready to do this now. And by gosh, we’ve got the right answers and let’s bring it on.’”
“I never was not nervous before a big argument,” he says.
For 25 years, Jack also served as board chair of the Poverty & Race Research Action Council, a DC-based federation of civil rights, civil liberties, and legal services organizations to encourage the national coordination of social scientific research as well as national and state advocacy on behalf of the poor.
He was also active for more than two decades in school finance litigation in North Carolina and Connecticut.
How did he think about losing cases, which too often meant losing clients?
“I can’t control the outcome. All I can control is my participation in it,” he says.
Other attorneys assured him that whether you’ve succeeded or not, your responsibility has been fully met by what you’re doing.
The most important thing?
“Just continuing to feel, ‘This needs doing,’” he says.
Read more about what he refers to as “the death penalty squad” and all of their cases here.
Source: Legal Defense Fund Oral History Project, interview with Jack Boger by Seth Kotch, Feb. 24, 2023, conducted in collaboration with the Southern Oral History Program, LDF Archives, Thurgood Marshall Institute, 86 pages.
Here is the article, and here is the full interview.
His tenure at the UNC School of Law
Once he joined the faculty of the School of Law at UNC in 1990, Jack primarily taught civil procedure, constitutional law, education law, civil rights law, and about race and poverty.
He was UNC’s associate dean for academic affairs from 1995-99. From 2001 until 2006, he served under Julius Chambers as the first deputy director of the UNC Center for Civil Rights. Then, for nine years from 2006-15, he served as its thirteenth dean of the law school.
A tribute to Jack, published in the North Carolina Law Review, notes, “His deanship was marked by many challenges, including the Great Recession and fundamental changes in the legal job market.”
As dean, Jack’s leadership focused on making sure Carolina Law was “a truly great public law school.”
“He believes the calling of this public law school is to public service and leadership for the public good,” notes the tribute.
During his tenure as dean, Jack:
- Worked to improve the legal writing skills of students,
- Focused on the transition to practice for students,
- Increased the number of faculty to decrease the student to faculty ratio,
- Established an International L.L.M.,
- Increased fundraising,
- Expanded career services, and
- Shepherded the law school through re-accreditation.
At one point, he had to remind the UNC Board of Governors that the university’s mission is to be a “catalyst for change.”
After 27 years, Jack retired in 2017 as the Wade Edwards Distinguished Professor of Law.
The tribute says, “The forces that move a leader and that person’s signature qualities are subject to differing perceptions and interpretations. For Jack, however, some of these are unmistakably clear. He loves North Carolina and, particularly, Carolina Law.”
“Two elements of Jack’s leadership style aided him in maintaining civility and good will among the faculty through this time,” says the tribute. Jack affirmed the work of the faculty, and “he worked to create an atmosphere of engagement and connection, even in times of disagreement.”
Jack has been married to Jennifer Brackenbury Boger since 1970, and they have two children, Gretchen and Peter. Gretchen wrote her senior thesis at Yale University about Anna Pauline “Pauli” Murray (1910-1985), “a brilliant civil rights activist and feminist pioneer, author, lawyer, professor, and eventually the first African American woman Episcopal priest.” Twenty years later, the Bogers established the Pauli Murray Endowed Divinity Scholarship.
In all that he has done, Jack is known, regarded, and loved for his “wisdom and grace.”
“To say that Jack Boger leads with wisdom and grace is to say that his life displays a balance of style and substance, and an alignment of head and heart,” says Ferrel Guillory, EdNC’s co-founder. “Jack is an exemplar of an attorney who applies the rule of law with a commitment to bringing more people into fuller participation in economic and civic life. As a professor and a dean, he strived to enrich the lives of emerging lawyers and to strengthen a great public university.”
His life’s work itself, says Guillory, is a lesson in the potency of wisdom and grace.
Source: Robert Mosteller, “In Appreciation: Dean Jack Boger,” 93 N.C. L. Rev. 1641 (2015).
