The ipso nitration of aryl boronic acid derivatives
has been developed using fuming nitric acid as the nitrating agent.
This facile procedure provides efficient and chemoselective access
to a variety of aromatic nitro compounds. While several activating
agents and nitro sources have been reported in the literature for
this synthetically useful transformation, this report demonstrates
that these processes likely generate a common active reagent, anhydrous
HNO3. Kinetic and mechanistic studies have revealed that
the reaction order in HNO3 is >2 and indicate that the •NO2 radical is the active species.