Dear Friends, 

These past few weeks have been awesome and awe-inspiring! 

On Saturday, May 24th, we held our Annual Commencement Ceremony at the Leavey Event Center, celebrating 219 graduates who have learned life-long habits of mind and heart that will empower them to serve their clients and their communities with competence, conscience, and compassion. 

We were treated to a wonderful commencement address by the legendary Howard S. Charney (MBA ’73, J.D. ’77, Hon. ’18), who applied his transformative Santa Clara education and his remarkable talents in engineering, business, and law to become a licensed patent attorney, to launch groundbreaking technology companies, and to help build the global internet. We have truly benefited from Howard’s extraordinary generosity and that of his wife Alida, as well as his constant support and mentorship for our students, his loving presence in the Howard S. and Alida S. Charney Hall of Law, and his visionary leadership, including through his current role as a University Trustee and as the Distinguished Professor of Innovation at the School of Law. 

Inspired by Howard’s message to “aim high,” our graduates are prepared to develop human centered solutions to the world’s most complex problems and to pursue humane and ethical approaches to the Rerum Novarum of our time– “new things” like emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence.   

I want to thank Howard, as well as everyone across our law school community, for providing our graduates and their families with an unforgettable series of experiences, culminating in our commencement. On the evening before graduation, we gathered with more than 400 graduates and their guests in the beautiful Mission Church for our annual Law Commencement Liturgy. We are so grateful to our presider and homolist, Fr. Matthew Carnes, S.J., for delivering a moving homily which stirred us to find joy in the work of using our legal training to pursue justice and serve others. We are also grateful to our concelebrants, acolytes, lectors, gift bearers, the Santa Clara Jesuit community, the University’s Office of Mission & Ministry, and the SCU Liturgical Choir directed by Fr. Julian Climaco, S.J. for leading a remarkable, spirit-filled, and loving service. 

Before the liturgy, we convened in the Adobe Lodge to celebrate the achievements of a stellar group of students who exemplify our collective dedication to academic excellence, leadership, and service. Please join me in congratulating our student award recipients and thanking especially John Bates, Jr. J.D. ’74, for generously supporting the John B. Bates, Jr. Dispute Resolution Award and Marshall Anstandig for presenting our new Justice A. Edward Panelli Leadership Award. 

As our faculty and staff-educators gathered in anticipation of all of our many commencement events, Debbie Snyder, our amazing Dean of Career Management, offered a wonderful reflection that captures the spirit of our law school community. Her reflection begins: 

“As we gather in this season of graduation, and as a mother whose youngest child will be graduating from undergrad this year, I’d like to take a few moments to reflect not just on the milestone our students & their families are celebrating, but also on what this moment means for all of us–faculty, staff, and the greater law school community–and in the spirit of our shared mission.

Graduation is often described as a culmination; a finish line after years of reading, writing, arguing & growing, but at a Jesuit institution, we know it's more than that. It’s a continuation of a calling. Our graduates are not just leaving with degrees, they are stepping into the world with a formation that reaches far deeper than legal knowledge. They are leaving shaped by a tradition that calls them to be people for and with others. It’s the moment when our students begin to carry forward the immense responsibility we’ve helped prepare them for: to serve justice, to question systems, to protect rights and to help shape a better world.

We have challenged them to think critically and act justly. We’ve taught them to ask not just what the law is, but whom it serves. And in doing so, we've invited them into a lifelong commitment to justice, equity, and compassion - principles that lie at the heart of Ignatian education.”

As Dean Snyder poignantly expresses, our graduates have become caring and collaborative critical thinkers and leaders who have answered the urgent call to uphold our constitutional democracy, to protect the rule of law, to seek truth, to pursue justice, and to reach for reconciliation. Many of our graduates already have achieved justice for their clients in our renowned clinics, externships, and international programs–helping them to satisfy their basic human needs, to protect their immigration rights, to launch their new business ventures, or to secure their exonerations, including the exoneration just last week of Regi Tanubagijo—the remarkable 38th such exoneration obtained by Santa Clara Law’s Northern California Innocence Project!  

As one tender and transformative law school community united by an ethic of loving kindness, we have been called by the late Pope Francis to have “an open heart toward everyone,” and by our new Pope Leo the 14th to become a “beacon of charity, truth, and unity, lighting the world’s dark places.” 

From the depths of my heart, I congratulate our extraordinary graduates and I thank you all! 

With warm regards and tremendous gratitude,

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