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As he begins his tenure as dean of the University of Arizona James E. Rogers College of Law, Jason Kreag’s priorities are clear: promote student success and elevate faculty both as scholars and as teachers.
Dean Kreag’s own career is marked by a passion for teaching, along with advocacy and scholarship that reflect a deep concern for the integrity of the U.S. legal system. He brings a variety of legal, teaching and even coaching experience to his new role, which he began on a permanent basis in April 2026 after more than a year as interim dean.
A teacher at heart
Since childhood, Dean Kreag envisioned himself becoming a teacher. As a teenager, he wanted to teach math and coach basketball. In college at DePauw University, where he was a guard on the men’s basketball team, he thought he might end up teaching economics. After completing his undergraduate degree, he earned a master’s degree in philanthropy from Indiana University. Dean Kreag’s academic curiosity, interest in teaching and desire to help others next led him to Harvard Law School, where he graduated in 2003.
In law school and afterward, Dean Kreag directed his energy toward assisting people in poverty, gradually shifting his focus to criminal law issues. After graduation, he was a staff attorney at the Southern Center for Human Rights, where he represented people on death row in their appeals. Eventually, Dean Kreag became a staff attorney at the Innocence Project. There, he enjoyed not only representing clients, but also engaging in the organization’s mission of reforming the criminal justice system.
Along the way, Dean Kreag set his legal career aside for a time to take a chance on his dream of coaching. After a year as an assistant coach at his alma mater DePauw, he returned to law and notes the similarities between coaching hoops and teaching law: “One of the parallels is finding ways to communicate with people that resonate with them. Both positions are public-facing and require vulnerability and authenticity.”
While at the Innocence Project, Dean Kreag tried his hand as a law professor for the first time, working as an adjunct professor at Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law, where the Innocence Project was founded as a clinic in 1992, and at Columbia Law School. The experience showed him what it was like to be a professor and lead a law classroom. He left the Innocence Project and clerked for a year with Judge Jon Newman in the Second Circuit Court of Appeals while applying for law school teaching positions.
A new opportunity
One of the first people Dean Kreag called during his academic job search was one of his mentors, Bernard Harcourt, a Columbia Law professor whom he met while Harcourt was a visiting professor at Harvard. Harcourt and Dean Kreag had much in common, as Harvard Law alumni who had represented death row appeals and were deeply interested in criminal justice reform.
And, as Dean Kreag was about to find out, Harcourt began his academic career at Arizona Law. When Dean Kreag asked what he thought of an open position as a visiting associate professor with the college, Harcourt’s advice was, “You should definitely try to get this job.”
“He knew that I needed to be around an intellectual community that would push me, that would challenge me, that would help me. He was thinking about me as a future scholar and what I might do as a legal academic,” Dean Kreag recalls. As it turned out, his mentor “was absolutely right.”
Contributing to community
Dean Kreag landed the position and quickly discovered what made the college distinctive: a strong and supportive intellectual community paired with a culture of close faculty-student engagement. That experience also reinforced the importance of community: “Because of our size, we have the opportunity to truly know our students. That creates relationships that allow us to support them, challenge them and learn from them in ways that can be difficult at much larger institutions.”
Dean Kreag thrived as an Arizona Law professor, earning accolades for teaching and service to the college. Shortly after achieving tenure in 2019, Kreag took on another role, as associate dean for academic affairs, working to help the school and its students maintain stability in the early months of the pandemic. When Dean Kreag stepped into the interim dean position in January 2025, he knew he was interested in the permanent deanship. After a rigorous search process, he was selected out of four finalists from prestigious law schools around the country.
As dean, Dean Kreag is bringing his entire background to bear. “I’ve had the opportunity to experience legal education from a variety of perspectives—as a student, adjunct professor, clinical professor, tenured faculty member and administrator. Each of those experiences has shaped how I think about leading our college.”
Beyond his understanding of what it takes to lead a law school, his decade-plus at Arizona Law gave him a deep connection to the institution and its people. “I care about the College of Law immensely,” he says. “By that point, I knew the college well and felt deeply invested in its success. It was easy to see myself dedicating my career to helping it be as good as it can be.”
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