Born in Zambia and educated in South Africa, Professor Neil Boister has held academic positions in South Africa, the UK and New Zealand where he first joined the University of Canterbury as a Senior Lecturer in 2003.
Promoted first to Associate Professor and then to a Chair in 2008, he worked at Canterbury until 2012 when he joined the University of Waikato as Associate Dean Postgraduate in the Law Faculty. He rejoined the University of Canterbury in 2017 and was appointed Head of the School of Law in the middle of 2018.
Professor Boister teaches mainly in criminal law and criminal justice and his research focuses almost exclusively on transnational criminal law. Recent publications in this area include An Introduction to Transnational Criminal Law (Second edition, OUP, 2018) and (with Professor Robert Currie of Dalhousie University) the Routledge Handbook of Transnational Criminal Law (Routledge, 2014).
In 2014 he was awarded the Friedrich Wilhelm Bessel Prize from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation in Germany for his work on transnational criminal law and in 2015 he was awarded the New Zealand Law Foundation’s International Fellowship to undertake a research project on the simplification of the law of extradition. His book on The Law of Extradition in New Zealand will be published by Thomson Reuters in 2019.