Dear Friends,
In these challenging times, I am especially grateful to be a member of our extraordinary Santa Clara Law community. Rising together, we are overcoming the obstacles we face by drawing on our tremendous distinctive strengths–our vital Jesuit mission and values, commitment to inclusive excellence, renowned and impactful faculty and staff-educators, loyal and engaged alumni, and location within Charney Hall at a world-class university in the heart of the global innovation hub. Our pathbreaking programs, centers, and clinics continue to provide human-centered solutions to urgent and complex problems, benefiting clients, communities, and our common home.
This newsletter highlights just a few of the countless ways in which we are instantiating those strengths. As part of our ongoing Dean’s Democracy Series, our faculty, staff-educators, alumni, and community partners have collaborated to offer enlightening forums about the many regulatory changes significantly impacting our community. We have scheduled workshops and programs dedicated to immigration law, policies, protocols, and resources; the impact of executive orders; the judiciary and constitutional structures; investor and consumer protection in the age of crypto, artificial intelligence and beyond; sports law; civility in the legal profession; social justice; the ramifications of City of Grants Pass v Johnson on the unhoused; and much more.
At the same time, we are leveraging our stature as the #1 provider of ABA-accredited international programs by extending our global reach and adding worldwide partnerships with universities and immersion experiences for our students over spring break in Munich (studying intellectual property and tech law) and London (studying advocacy and comparative dispute resolution). True to our spirit of innovation and the great success of our trailblazing programs like the Tech Edge JD, the Flex JD, and the Public Interest JD, we also have created the Law Innovation Lab, which, under the terrific leadership of Laura Norris, our Associate Dean for Academic Affairs and Director of Innovation, is an incubator for the design and implementation of new mission-aligned programs that give students skills that will empower them to develop solutions to pressing social issues and achieve great professional success and well-being.
With the incredible generosity of our alumni, we are increasing scholarships and financial aid to ensure that every student who is admitted to our law school will enroll and complete their legal education regardless of their financial circumstances. With the remarkable dedication and teamwork of our faculty, staff-educators, the Office of Academic and Bar Success, and the Office of Career Management, we are achieving successful student outcomes in the form of dramatic increases in bar passage and employment opportunities.
Our Jesuit mission, however, calls us to do more. In keeping with our core Jesuit principle of cura personalis, we are caring deeply for each other during this time of great change and uncertainty–mind, body, soul, and spirit. I am proud to report that the deans of every one of the 14 Jesuit University law schools have formed a very close collaborative team, devoted to articulating and incarnating our shared Jesuit values. At the annual Association of American Law Schools Conference at the start of the new year, all of the Jesuit law school deans met for their annual retreat and also hosted a joint reception for an overflow crowd of faculty, staff-educators, alumni, and community partners from law schools and universities throughout the world. Together, we celebrated 500 years of inclusive excellence in Jesuit education and toasted to the next 500 years. In connection with the reception, I had the honor of engaging in a deep discussion of our Jesuit mission with Father John Topel, S.J., the Stamper Professor Emeritus and Former Acting President of Seattle University. Fr. Topel brilliantly distinguished knowledge from wisdom, and declared that Jesuit education is not just dedicated to the generation of knowledge; it is devoted to the spreading of wisdom for the world.

As a law school inspired by our Jesuit mission, we are indeed called to spread wisdom, which requires us not just to seek truth, but also to pursue justice, reach for reconciliation, and accompany each other in the creation of a hope-filled future. Now, more than ever, Santa Clara Law is answering that call!
With abiding love and gratitude,

Michael J. Kaufman (He/Him/His)
Dean and Professor of Law
Santa Clara University School of Law
mjkaufman@scu.edu