Donald 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 students. 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 202021, 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.
