Dear Friends,

In this Holiday Season of gratitude, I want to express my great thanks to each and every one of you, the members of the Santa Clara Law community. 

Even in these distressing times, in which every day we seem to face another horrific act of violence and hate, you have risen together to bear witness to the overriding value of our beloved community as a beacon of light and a vessel of justice and hope. 

In the spirit of the powerful poetry of Maya Angelou: Still we rise.   

Together, you have expanded access to justice in countless ways, including by working to ensure that every student who is admitted to our law school has the opportunity to enroll and succeed, regardless of their financial circumstances or backgrounds. True to their spirit of generosity, our alumni have contributed mightily to increase our student scholarships. As the Chronicle of Higher Education recently recognized, Santa Clara Law has “set a high bar for institutional aid” with its pathbreaking PLEDGE scholarship, which empowers our awe-inspiring students to meet their entire tuition costs through guaranteed federal loans. 

Still we rise. 

Our students are indeed awe-inspiring. In the midst of all of their hard work to prepare for their classes and assessments, they have led by their example of rigor, resilience, and care for each other and their communities, devoting more than 60,000 hours of pro bono legal services in the past year alone. 

With the support of our renowned faculty and caring staff-educators, our students have experienced the beauty and fulfillment of formation in the true Jesuit sense. They have developed lifelong habits of mind and heart through our holistic, values-based education that transcends professional training to educate the whole person: mind, body, soul, and spirit. Our students strive for excellence, yearn for the greater good, practice reflection and discernment, engage in respectful dialogue across their celebrated differences, seek the divine in every smidgen of human experience, and are called to use their formidable knowledge and skills in the service of and with others, particularly the poor, the displaced, the marginalized, and those whose human dignity has been violated.  

Still we rise. 

Our graduates not only have passed the Bar and achieved rewarding careers in impressive and dramatically increasing numbers (their recent 81.5% first-time California Bar exam passage represents a 18.5% increase over the past two years, and their 87% employment rate represents a 13% increase over the past two years), they have become contemplatives in action who think critically, implement human centered approaches to emerging technologies, reflect deeply on the world, and act with integrity, ethics, and compassion to serve their clients and uphold our democratic values. 

Because our law school is a leader in international law and the home to the #1 provider of accredited ABA study abroad programs, our students also graduate with the knowledge, skills, and values to engage with clients across countries and to collaborate in the care of our common home. 

Still we rise. 

As we recently announced, our alumna Madhumita “Mita” Datta, J.D. ’16 has made a transformative gift to Santa Clara University School of Law’s High Tech Law Institute to support the growth and impact of our pathbreaking and acclaimed program, which has been consistently ranked #4 in Intellectual Property in the country. The $5 million donation, made in honor of Mita’s late parents, Madhuri Datta and Sunil Datta, will endow the High Tech Law Institute, which will be renamed Datta Center for High Tech Law, and advance its mission to educate and prepare our students to lead at the intersection of law, technology, business, ethics, and society. 

In our characteristically thoughtful approach to new technologies, we also have developed a strategic partnership with Hotshot, a learning platform for the legal industry, which will bring an innovative and ethical generative AI curriculum to our students, faculty, and staff-educators. The custom, six-class curriculum covers the foundations of GenAI for legal practice, exploring a range of topics such as legal applications of large language models, effective prompting, and professional responsibility. The mandatory Hotshot curriculum will be incorporated into Santa Clara Law’s “Critical Lawyering Skills” course this spring as part of the professional identity formation of all of our students. This new partnership is a key component of our multifaceted strategy for approaching emerging technologies with curiosity, carefully integrating AI into our programs, and equipping everyone across the law school with the tools they need to excel in this new era. 

Still we rise. 

Our distinctive GenAI legal training, Datta High Tech Law Center, Pledge Scholarship, increasing financial aid, and surging student outcomes are all built on a strong foundation of our shared Jesuit values. At their heart, those values reflect a fundamental truth: wisdom and well-being are not captured in a zero-sum game, they are co-created through loving relationships, including with God. 

Still we’ll rise…

With tremendous gratitude, I wish you all a joyous Holiday Season blessed with health, happiness, peace, and loving relationships,

 

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