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Pepperdine | Caruso School of Law

Mission Statement

flowers at law school building

Strengthening Lives for Purpose, Service, and Leadership

MISSION

As part of Pepperdine University, Caruso School of Law aspires to be a preeminent global Christian law school, integrating premier legal training with the highest standards of ethics and morality. This aspiration is built on a foundational commitment to both academic excellence and Christian values.

VISION

Pepperdine Caruso Law seeks to provide students with an outstanding and rigorous legal education through classroom instruction, advanced experiential learning, and hands-on clinical and externship placements. We not only seek to instill in our students a deep understanding of the law, but we also seek to engage with them holistically—to provide them with a transformative educational experience that strengthens them for lives of purpose, service, and leadership. Our abiding goal is to equip our students to lead with character and conviction—to serve the world as outstanding legal professionals imbued with the highest standards of ethics and morality.

As a diverse community grounded in Christian values, our institution is guided by faith in Jesus Christ and intentionally seeks to reflect Him to the world. We therefore seek to build a community that is rooted in love, justice, truth, and grace—one that engenders a deep sense of belonging and connection with respect to every single member. We celebrate, embrace, and seek to broaden the diversity of personal backgrounds, lived experiences, and viewpoints within our community, as such diversity is essential to our community’s vitality. We welcome students from all faith backgrounds (or no faith background at all). This core commitment to diversity is grounded on our Christian values: we value each individual as a perfect creation of God (Col. 1:16-17), and we are called to be all things for all people so that we can best serve them (1 Cor. 9:21–22). Care for the whole person therefore guides our relationships and motivates our pursuit of holistic wellness from a mental, physical, and spiritual perspective. We strive to be a place where people make meaningful lifelong connections—not simply as students, professors, or staff, but as human beings. 

Furthermore, the pursuit of truth underlies our institutional commitment to academic excellence. We are therefore committed to nurturing respectful discourse and debate within an environment that values free speech principles—one that encourages a broad range of different arguments and perspectives and does not shy away from difficult conversations. This commitment to intellectual diversity is rooted not only in the academic imperative to pursue the truth fearlessly, but also in our pedagogical imperative to train future legal professionals that are equipped to confront and consider differing viewpoints and arguments. We seek to build an academic and scholarly community in which this sort of vibrant, wide-ranging discourse is conducted in a spirit of unity and love—one that respects the dignity and diverse viewpoints of each person.