American University Washington College of Law Names Myers Scholarship Award Recipient
May 5, 2021
American University Washington College of Law recently awarded Kyle Ehlers ’21 with the Myers Scholarship Award.
The Myers Law Scholarship, AUWCL’s most prestigious donor award, provides one-year scholarships to full-time JD students who show academic promise and performance and demonstrate financial need. Scholarships are funded up to 125% of tuition. Ehlers was selected for the scholarship because of his academic and personal achievements, as well as active and generous engagement within the AUWCL community.
Ehlers is an honors graduate of the University of Washington, Bothell (Bothell, WA) where he received his BA in Law, Economics and Public Policy. While at AUWCL, Ehlers has earned the “highest class grade designation” in two courses, currently serves a blog editor for the Criminal Law Practitioner, and previously served as the Black Law Student Association’s Director of Alumni and Faculty Affairs.
His growing legal experience includes practicing as a student attorney in both the law school’s International Human Rights Law Clinic and Criminal Justice Clinic (Defense), serving as a law clerk at the Public Defender Service for the District of Columbia and the Maryland Office of the Public Defender, and clerking for a private firm.
The scholarship was presented to Ehlers at the Legends and Leaders event – an annual celebration of alumni, faculty, and student achievement – hosted by AUWCL’s Office of Development and Alumni Relations.
Watch Kyle Ehlers' Speech Here
“I am honored to be the esteemed recipient of the Myers scholarship. Growing up in Southern California, I was never comfortable believing access, opportunity, and fairness under the law should be determined on the basis of racial and economic divisions,” said Ehlers. “I remember questioning why so many people around me were victims to cycles of poverty and anguish, constantly subjugated by a criminal punishment system we flippantly call ‘just.’”
Upon graduating from AUWCL, Ehlers will join the King County Department of Public Defense, in Seattle, WA, as a trial attorney where he hopes to “fight for my clients and demand that the state acknowledge their humanity.”