PROVO — When a future apostle and a future U.S. Supreme Court nominee learned that the Chicago law firm where they worked did not plan to hire a qualified law school graduate they knew because it had a policy against hiring Jewish people, the young attorneys went together to the firm’s managing partner.
The policy was discriminatory and shortsighted, said President Dallin H. Oaks, now first counselor in the First Presidency of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and the late Robert Bork, who served as U.S. solicitor general and acting U.S. attorney general.
The firm changed its policy and hired the man, causing other law firms to change their policies, BYU President Shane Reese said Thursday at the university’s 2025 commencement exercises.
President Oaks presided and spoke briefly to honor Judge J. Clifford Wallace, whom BYU leaders gave an honorary doctoral degree for law and public service.
Speakers encouraged the 7,194 BYU graduates of the 2024-25 school year to commit similarly to faith, family, community engagement, service and professional excellence during graduation ceremonies at the Marriott Center on campus.
“You entered to learn — now go forth to serve,” said Reese, paraphrasing the sign at the entrance to campus on Cougar Boulevard.
The commissioner of the Church Education System, Elder Clark G. Gilbert, was the commencement speaker. He said the hope and charge church leaders have for BYU graduates is that they will “Hold up your light that it may shine unto the world,” an instruction Jesus Christ gave disciples in the Book of Mormon (3 Nephi 18:24).
“As you leave today, we invite you to be that light on the hill,” he said.
Elder Gilbert, who is a General Authority Seventy, said, “BYU is the hope of the church and the flagship of the Church Educational System.”
Church leaders want BYU graduates to influence the world for good by balancing professional and academic distinction with the integrity of their faith, he said.
“You might consider these dual responsibilities a simultaneous call for excellence with a call for discipleship,” he said.
Elder Gilbert urged students to avoid isolating themselves to preserve faith or apologizing for their faith.
“If you let the call for excellence supersede your call to discipleship, you will risk mimicking the world and eventually apologizing for your faith,” he said. “If you let the call for faithfulness cause you to isolate yourself from the secular world, you may preserve your faith, but you will miss the opportunity to be a light to the world.”
Elder Gilbert said BYU graduates become lights to the world when they “live their beliefs confidently and courageously even as they learn from others and engage in their community. They build friendships with others of differing beliefs and invite them into their lives, always representing the restored gospel of Jesus Christ with courage, faith and dignity.”
Reese noted that years after President Oaks and Bork stood up for their Jewish colleague, President Oaks was subpoenaed to testify at the U.S. Senate hearings for Bork’s Supreme Court nomination. There, President Oaks learned that the man they stood up for had become the firm’s managing partner.
The commencement exercises included several other examples of inspiration.
President Oaks said he was assigned to deliver the congratulations of church President Russell M. Nelson to Wallace, the longest-serving federal judge in the United States, according to Reese.
Wallace said he was the son of an immigrant who was an abusive alcoholic with a third-grade education. He joined the Church of Jesus Christ because of four friends he had in high school, where he had been a C- and D+ student. He served in the Navy and then went to college on the GI Bill, eventually becoming the editor of the law review at the University of California, Berkeley.
Wallace was the first Latter-day Saint to serve on a U.S. Court of Appeals and the first to serve as a chief judge of a Court of Appeals. He served on the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals for 26 years.
For half a century, he spent his vacations traveling the world to help 72 countries enshrine the rule of law in their systems.
President Oaks said the First Presidency of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints well knew of Wallace’s powerful impact.
“Internationally, his leadership and teaching to advance the rule of law and the administration of justice in the legal systems of 72 nations is unique among the judges of the world,” President Oaks said. “Speaking from our commitment to the divinely inspired principles of the U.S. Constitution, which applies to all men, we believe in the rule of law. We honor Judge Wallace as a worthy example of that rule of law and commend his example to lawyers, judges and citizens worldwide.”
Wallace told graduates that he put family and faith first and then balanced his work as first a trial lawyer and then a judge.
“I found that if I carefully and prayerfully made the most important parts of my life consistent with their eternal worth, I accomplished much more of the real value in my life’s endeavors,” Wallace said.
“God bless you as you go out,” he said.
The student commencement speaker was Amy Ortiz, who said her family immigrated to the United States from Mexico when she was 9, and that her degree in journalism is a miracle for someone who once found speaking, reading and writing English so difficult.
“All of us, no matter who we are or where we are from, have an underdog story,” said Ortiz, a Church News intern.
She encouraged her fellow graduates, who now join nearly 460,000 BYU alumni, to launch a lifetime of consecrated service.
“Let us place our trust in the Savior — the single greatest underdog and miracle the world has ever seen — knowing that through him, we too will rise to victory.”
The Key Takeaways for this article were generated with the assistance of large language models and reviewed by our editorial team. The article, itself, is solely human-written.
