500 El Camino Real
Santa Clara, California 95053
408.554.4361
Santa Clara University Home
THE NEXT
CENTURY
Dean Donald J. Polden on the Future of Santa Clara Law
As Santa Clara Law wrapped up our year-long Centennial celebration, we talked with Dean Donald J. Polden about the past, present, and future of the law school.
SCLaw: It has been a year filled with celebration. What were the highlights of this Centennial Year for you personally?
DJP: It has been a fabulous year, one that has significantly exceeded all our expectations. We achieved one of our most important goals this year which was to reconnect with our alumni, to engage or re-engage them in what the law school has meant to the community, and to share where we are headed in the future. Through our many regional celebrations and the Gala itself, we were able to connect directly with a couple thousand graduates! We were delighted to produce and distribute our Centennial book to all of our graduates, which helped remind them of our rich history, and of the law school’s significance to themselves and to Silicon Valley. I relished the opportunity to gather with so many alumni, to hear their stories about their law school experiences and what their legal education at Santa Clara meant to their careers and their future. The celebration of our past and present has generated a contagious enthusiasm for the future, and so many alumni and friends have told me they are inspired to help us continue to succeed in our next century. We have a very proud alumni community!
SCLaw: How has the Centennial provided a springboard to the future?
DJP: The Centennial has provided an excellent platform for us to do three things: to think about and celebrate our past, to focus on who we are now, and to envision where we need to be in the future. The future holds significant challenges and uncertainties for legal education and for practicing lawyers. We have to anticipate the skills and abilities that tomorrow’s lawyers will need in order to face these new challenges such as strengthening the national infrastructure for health care, developing international protocols for privacy rights, and crafting laws to deal with new technologies such as autonomously driven vehicles. We are carefully reviewing our philosophy, our staff, our facilities, and our programs, and we are articulating a clear, ambitious future for Santa Clara Law in the next century.
SCLaw: What will the Santa Clara Law of the future look like?
DJP: Tomorrow’s lawyers need significant leadership skills— such as teamwork, team building, and project management— that we are not teaching now in a comprehensive, robust way. I think of them as “next century skills” for lawyers, because this is the direction our world is going—in our communities and in business and commerce. We must prepare students to succeed in this new world. Secondly, the lawyers of the future need breadth and depth of legal knowledge. During the last 25 to 30 years, the legal landscape has changed significantly, and it will continue to change at an even faster pace. To help shape and inform the future that will be created by decision makers in law and business, government, and politics, our faculty must continue to share their challenging, creative, and new ideas about where the law is and where it should be. Thirdly, lawyers in the future are going to rely increasingly on technology—to interact with their clients, with the courts, and with businesses. We must educate our students for that enhanced technological practice of law. We need to build it into our teaching, and in order to do so, we must build it into our facilities.
SCLaw: What are the top priorities for Santa Clara Law in the future?
DJP: Our top priority right now is to develop educationally appropriate and technologically advanced facilities. We need high tech learning environments where our students can interact and collaborate in a more professional way with each other, with faculty and staff, and with lawyers and judges in the community. I like to think of it as Silicon Valley-caliber learning spaces for the law school of Silicon Valley.
“When our alumni are involved, engaged and connected, the Santa Clara Law Community will grow even stronger as our next century begins. There are excellent opportunities for them to share their tremendous skill sets and knowledge with our students—to share all they have been doing for their clients and for their communities. I look forward to drawing on those skills and expertise as we learn more about how we can best prepare the leading lawyers of tomorrow.” —Dean Donald J. Polden
SCLaw: How does the Jesuit tradition of Santa Clara University inform the law school’s future?
DJP: Great universities have great law schools. Our success in the future is going to be built together with SCU’s reputation and its goal and plans. A number of the transcendent values that we see in our program and in our graduates are fundamentally a part of the University’s mission. For example, the University aims to educate men and women of competence, conscience, and compassion. The law school shares that goal, and our graduates are people who are not only very capable, gifted, and well informed lawyers but also people who care deeply about their clients, their communities, and their relationships with other lawyers in the court room and in transactions. Our school’s values have been shaped by the Jesuit tradition that we have here, and that will continue into the future.
SCLaw: How can alumni help shape the future of Santa Clara Law?
DJP: We welcome and need our alumni to stay connected and engaged with their law school. There are so many demands on young lawyers today—families, jobs, volunteer and community work—but I hope our graduates will find enough time to stay involved with the mission, goals, needs, and ambitions of their law school. There are many ways to do so, from learning about issues the school is facing, to celebrating the successes of other alumni, to keeping up on news through our Alumni eNews, Twitter, or Facebook. Staying connected provides alumni with the opportunity to participate in the classroom, meet our current students and future attorneys, and interact with our young graduates. Staying connected gives our alumni the latest information on continuing education while discovering the future of legal education. Staying connected provides our alumni with a chance to give back in appreciation for what their law school is doing and has done.
