From Malibu to Elk Ridge, Negotiation Competition Prepares Students for Service
Student takes lessons learned in law classes and is able to immediately help a small city find resolutions to problems while still attending school.
Change people's lives at home and around the world
February 2017
What did you do over the summer? In 2015 BYU Law School student Brooke Ellis filed a bill in Congress.
Ellis spent two months last year interning with Utah Senator Mike Lee and the Senate Judiciary Committee, and prior to that, she had an internship preparing trials at the U.S. Department of Justice.
Ellis has always wanted to be a public servant, she says, and she pursued a law career because she sees it as a way to help people. A Jack P. Peterson externship grant from BYU’s J. Reuben Clark Law School made her summer experience a reality. “I wouldn’t have been able to pursue my interests and dreams without the funding that really made it possible. It was life-changing for me,” she says.
Help also came from law professor Michalyn Steele and BYU Law School dean Gordon Smith, who guided and advised Ellis as an undergraduate student when she was considering law school. “Without Professor Steele and Dean Smith mentoring me, I wouldn’t have known what opportunities were available to me,” Ellis says. “They were really instrumental in shaping my career path and helping me figure out what I was good at and what I liked.”
Student takes lessons learned in law classes and is able to immediately help a small city find resolutions to problems while still attending school.
Union, justice, tranquility, defence [sic], welfare, and liberty are words in the preamble of the Constitution of the United States. Their meanings may seem clear to you today, but do you know how they were used in 1787 when the document was written? And does a change in meaning really matter?
Brianna Rosier arrived at BYU dedicated to a future in public interest; she now enters her final year at law school with an idea of what her future holds.