Published on Oct. 17, 2023

Updated on Aug. 15, 2024

Skydiving, visiting all 50 states, running the New York City Marathon, and writing a law school casebook  — Floyd R. Gibson Endowed Professor Andrea Boyack has crossed off a number of her bucket list items in the last 20 years.

Her professional experience is as varied as her bucket lists.

After completing her undergraduate degree in Russian and international relations at Brigham Young University, Boyack initially had no intention of going to law school but took (and enjoyed!) the LSAT. She decided to go to law school when the Ford Foundation offered to pay for her master’s degree at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University if she also obtained a JD. Boyack ended up getting a law degree from the University of Virginia School of Law to supplement her MALD. When she went to law school, however, she didn’t anticipate a career in the law.

“My dad had always told me that I should go to law school, and I just thought it sounded really boring,” Boyack said. “I didn’t expect to like law school — but I loved law school, it was a real shock to me.”

After law school and a federal clerkship in New York City, Boyack started practicing international business law with a “Big Law” firm in New York. She started out working on a variety of financing deals but developed a particular interest in real property.

“I like to be able to point to an office building or a stadium and say, ‘I worked on the deal that helped build that.’ It was kind of cool to see the actual tangible things.”

In her 14 years of practice, Boyack worked on a variety of legal proceedings, including real estate transactions and financings. She worked in Big Law in New York and the DC area and was in-house counsel to a national real estate developer. But shortly before the 2008 financial crisis, she tried a stint in academia – and never looked back.

In addition to authoring multiple books and scholarly articles, Boyack has taught courses involving real estate, transactional, finance, and bankruptcy law at a variety of law schools. She joins Mizzou Law from Washburn University, where she was the Norman R. Pozez Chair of Business & Transactional Law and co-director of the school’s Business and Transactional Law Center.

Boyack said that she chose to come to Mizzou because of its strong reputation for real estate law and because of two esteemed mentors, Professor Emeritus Dale Whitman and Professor Wilson Freyermuth.

“When I was in practice, I only had ever heard of real estate professors at one law school, and that was Mizzou,” Boyack said.

Boyack can now say she is one of those same Mizzou real estate professors. This academic year, Boyack will teach two foundational courses — contracts and property. She also teaches several upper-level courses related to finance and real estate.