Donald J PoldenDonald J. Polden is dean emeritus and professor of law at
Santa Clara University, where he served as dean of the School of Law for ten
years. He is a well-recognized authority on leadership education and
development for lawyers and law studets. He drew national attention to the
need for more formal and research-based scholarship and curriculum development
in legal education through the early creation of a law school course on lawyers
as leaders. Professor Deborah Rhode of Stanford, another early pioneer of lawyer
leadership education, referred to Don as "truly a founding father of the field
of lawyers and leadership."

Don also is a demonstrated leader, serving as dean of two
major law schools from 1993 to 2013 and promoting legal education within the
American Bar Association and the Association of American Law Schools. His list of
significant leadership roles includes chair of the ABA committee that established
accreditation standards for more than two hundred law schools, leading dozens
of law school accreditation teams, and serving as president of the Memphis Bar
Association, to name a few. While at Santa Clara University, Don has served as
director of the law school's Center for Global Law and Policy, responsible for
ten international legal education programs, several of which he taught in while
also lecturing on comparative law at universities in China and Hungary. Don is
frequently called upon to serve as a mediator, arbitrator, and judicial officer
in many Santa Clara campus disciplinary proceedings.

Following service as Santa Clara's dean, Don has been
actively engaged in teaching and scholarship, especially in the areas of
leadership development, professional identity formation of law students and new
lawyers, and lawyering skills and competencies. He also continues to teach
corporate, sports, and antitrust law, and cofounded and led Santa Clara's
nationally prominent Institute for Sports Law and Ethics. Don consults with law
firms on leadership development of their lawyers, such as intellectual property
and corporate law powerhouse Haynes Boone, and lectures at the U.S. Army's
Judge Advocate General graduate program on leadership development of U.S. Army
lawyer officers, the University of Calgary law school, and others.

Don created and leads Santa Clara's Institute for Lawyer
Leadership Education, which has conducted several national conferences and
workshops on educating lawyers and students in leadership in the legal
profession, including five leadership workshops for legal education hosted by Santa
Clara from 2005 to 2013. He was instrumental in the 2018 launch of a new
Section on Leadership for the Association of American Law Schools. This section
includes more than six hundred members, representing nearly one hundred law
schools' courses and programs. The section meets annually to promote leadership
education in law schools, advance legal scholarship concerning law and
leadership, and arrange programming. In 2020-21, Don served as chair of the
section.

Don received an undergraduate degree in business economics
from The George Washington University and his JD from Indiana University School
of Law. During law school, he wrote for the Indiana Law Review and following
graduation served as a judicial law clerk on both state appellate and federal
trial courts. He practiced antitrust law, including participating in five
federal jury trials, and he argued several cases in the U.S. Courts of Appeal
and the U.S. Supreme Court. Don is licensed to practice law in the state of
Iowa and federal courts.

Don has been teaching leadership for lawyers' classes for
more than a decade and is a frequent speaker at national conferences, other law
schools' classes, and within law firms on leadership and the legal profession. He
is the author of numerous law review articles on lawyer leadership, which have
been published in the Baylor Law Review, Santa Clara Law Review, the Hofstra
Law Review, the Tennessee Law Review, and the Tennessee Journal of Law and
Policy. His antitrust scholarship has been published in the Harvard Journal on
Legislation, and his work has been cited by the U.S. Supreme Court. Don
coauthored Sports, Ethics and Leadership and Leading in Law: Leadership
Development for Law Students (with Barry Posner), and he has authored several
book chapters on lawyer leadership, employment law, and government regulation
law. Don received the Edwin Owens Lawyer of the Year award given by the Santa
Clara University Law School.

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