In her charge to the Class of 2015 at Stanford Law School’s graduation ceremony on Saturday, June 13, Dean M. Elizabeth Magill readily acknowledged, “This has been a hard year,” but she found reasons for optimism in the students receiving their degrees as she greeted the crowd of around 1,500 gathered in Canfield Courtyard.

She began by welcoming the parents and friends of the 192 students receiving doctor of jurisprudence (JD) degrees and the 75 students receiving advanced degrees. “Thank you for helping make these graduates who they are, thank you for supporting them, and thank you for sharing them with us. They are inspiring and funny and skilled and kind and charming and memorable and talented and smart and wise – all at once. We have been privileged to teach them and we are bursting with pride to be able to call them our graduates,” said Magill, the Richard E. Lang Professor of Law.

Many of those students and the dean herself wore black stoles atop their graduation robes, printed with the “Black Lives Matter” theme of numerous events, classes and programs held at the law school during the past year. It was a topic all of the speakers mentioned, while urging the students to build upon the training, practical experience and sense of community they had shared at the law school in order to tackle the problems that dominated the news in 2014-15.