John Charles "Jack" Boger is a native of Concord, North Carolina. After completing law school, he clerked with the Honorable Samuel Silverman of the N.Y. 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 NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund (LDF), 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 at LDF established to enlarge the legal rights of the minority poor.
Boger joined the UNC School of Law faculty in 1990. 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 N.C. and throughout the southeast.
Boger is also chair of 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. He has taught as a lecturer or adjunct professor at Harvard, New York Law School and Florida State University. He teaches constitutional law, education law, racial discrimination and poverty law.