Dear Friends,

In this season of gratitude and reflection culminating in our upcoming commencement ceremony, I am particularly pleased to share that Santa Clara Law has achieved the extraordinary distinction of becoming the world’s first Reggio-inspired law school.  

After the northern Italian city of Reggio-Emilia was destroyed in World War II, the city’s leaders dedicated themselves to rebuilding their community around children. More than eighty years later, the city has developed a system of education that is the envy of the world because it is grounded in a profound, research-based appreciation for the ways in which children, and indeed human beings, actually learn and flourish. As confirmed by the latest discoveries in neuroscience, brain imaging, and developmental psychology, human beings learn only through meaningful relationships. While surface behavior can be operantly conditioned in an isolated, atomistic, and competitive way through external rewards and punishments, true learning and human flourishing are constructed socially through natural curiosity, cooperation, collaboration, connection, and community. 

Inspired by the Reggio experience, the world’s leading early childhood educational environments have adapted these proven learning principles to their particular contexts with remarkable results for all learners and their communities. Santa Clara Law has now done so in the law school context. 

What does it mean to be a Reggio-inspired law school?  It means that we practice social constructivist pedagogies; implement a student centered, emergent, and experiential curriculum; embrace inclusive excellence; build authentic connections between campus and community; exercise design thinking to co-create human centered solutions to the world’s most urgent and complex problems; cherish our environment as a dynamic teacher; document the process and products of collaborative learning and scholarship; foster universal design; embrace neurodiversity as a great strength; accompany each other in a mission of justice and reconciliation; and value all members of the learning community as equal learners, researchers, educators, and precious human beings.

Our Reggio inspired law school is fully aligned with our Jesuit mission and Ignatian values. This mission calls us to expand access and opportunity for students from all walks of life, to foster an ethic of loving kindness, to engage in cura personalis, to care deeply for each other, to promote Ignatian ways of leading and learning, to walk with the poor, the marginalized, and those whose dignity has been violated, to collaborate in the care for our common home, an integral ecology, and the universal destination of goods, to design curious, ethical, and human centered approaches to new technologies, to treat every human being with equal dignity and respect, and to accompany each other in the creation of a hope filled future. 

At its heart, an Ignatian inspired and Reggio inspired educational environment like Santa Clara Law is relational, not transactional; it is democratic, not authoritarian; it is egalitarian, not hierarchical; it is ethical, not amoral; it is cooperative, not cutthroat; it is connecting, not isolating; and it is fulsome, not fractional. In this spirit, our law school lifts up all members of our connected community rather than incenting them to fight each other in a manufactured zero sum game. As the overwhelming research, and our own Santa Clara Law experience proves, this kind of environment shapes attorneys—including our newest graduates—who, because they naturally acquire exceptional relationship-building skills, achieve profound professional knowledge, skills, values, success, well-being, happiness, and fulfillment.
  
It is validating that Santa Clara Law has recently been honored for incarnating these paramount and distinctive values and strengths. Specifically: 

• Santa Clara Law’s #4 US News ranking and A+ National Jurist assessment in intellectual property and tech law, which provides evidence of the depth of its relationships, through which it disseminates education, research, resources, and impact regarding human centered approaches to emerging technologies such as AI, including in the newly-endowed Datta Center for High Tech Law and the unique Tech Edge JD.
  
  
• Santa Clara Law’s #1 position among all law schools in offering ABA accredited international study abroad programs to law students from many law schools and its A+ National Jurist assessment in international law, which provides evidence of the strength of its global relationships from which knowledge, peaceful conflict resolution, and care for our common home can be constructed. 
  
  
• Santa Clara Law’s #10 stature among all law schools for social justice in National Jurist, which bears witness to its commitment to walk with the marginalized, the vulnerable, and those whose dignity has been violated in a mission of reconciliation and justice, including through its pro bono services, Center for Social Justice and Public Service, Public Interest JD, Ignatian pedagogy, wrap around student services and academic support, trauma informed practices, restorative justice circles, reflective dialogue,myriad programs dedicated to upholding democratic values, and its six community based clinics, the Northern California Innocence Project, the Alexander Community Law Center Clinic, the Entrepreneurs’ Law Clinic, the Human Rights Clinic, the Unhoused Initiative, the Immigration Appellate Practicum, and the new Bates Mediation Clinic.
  
  
• Santa Clara Law’s #15 US News status among all law school part-time JD programs, which is a testament to its Flex JD program, making law school possible for students from all walks of life and empowering them to form life long professional relationships. 
  
  
• Santa Clara Law’s one-of-a-kind Pledge Scholarship, which ensures that every student admitted to Santa Clara Law will be able to enroll, pay their tuition entirely through guaranteed federal aid, and succeed regardless of their financial circumstances. 
  
  
• Santa Clara Law’s #6 most beautiful campus in the country according to travel and Leisure Magazine and its stunning Charney Hall of Law, centered by the awe-inspiring Mission Church, which calls us all to incarnate our Jesuit mission in countless ways, including through an open hearted faith that does justice and an integral ecology between the environment, learning, service, well-being, and joy. 

There are countless recent examples of how we continue to build on these great values and strengths, including: the establishment of the Nanette Cannon Fellowship, which will lovingly honor the blessed memory of our remarkable Admissions Director, Nannette Cannon by giving more students the opportunity to receive a Santa Clara Law education regardless of their financial circumstances; our alumna and 2026 Commencement Speaker, Hon. Risë Jones Pichon, who has lived out our Mission through her life-long pursuit of justice for all; and the 86.7% of Santa Clara Law graduates who just passed the California bar exam on their first try and will be sworn in next week on their journeys to careers of prominence and purpose. 

With warm regards and great gratitude for the joy and privilege of serving this exceptional Reggio and Ignatian inspired Santa Clara Law community,  

 

Michael J. Kaufman
Dean and Professor of Law
Santa Clara University School of Law