Hurst Horizon Scholars Embrace the Future

Tracy Walls got to witness her son’s decision to become a lawyer, and even though she passed away before he got accepted at Yale Law School, there was no doubt in her mind that he would.

“She always believed I would end up at Yale or Harvard,” said Walls. “She got me to apply.” 

Acceptance was only the first step, though. Walls knew he could only attend law school if he also qualified for a full-tuition scholarship. When he got the call that he would receive the Hurst Horizon Scholarship at Yale Law School, a huge weight left his shoulders.

“My family was always worried about debt, even if it’s ‘good debt,’ so to have the tuition entirely covered made me feel like I could pursue things I wouldn’t normally pursue. If my tuition weren’t covered, I might have felt I needed to go into Big Law, but I feel I can go where my heart takes me,” said Walls.

This spring, Walls graduated with his J.D., having qualified for the scholarship for all three years of law school. At Yale Law School, he studied civil rights law and public interest law, worked on the Housing Clinic and Challenging Mass Incarceration Clinic, was a Ludwig Fellow, and served as President of the First Generation Professionals.

In other words, he was able to fulfill his mother’s dream — and his own.

The Soledad ’92 and Robert Hurst Horizon Scholarship Program was established in 2022 — the first full-tuition scholarship in legal education that is based entirely on need. The program erases tuition, fees, and the cost of health insurance for J.D. students with significant financial need.

Yale Law School graduates already benefit from its groundbreaking Career Options Assistance Program (COAP), one of the most generous student loan repayment program plans in the country. But for talented low-income students who might decline a seat at Yale in the first place, the Hurst Horizon Program has removed an enormous obstacle.

In 2024–2025, 89 Yale Law students walked the hallways tuition-free, including 15% of the 1L class, a number that is unmatched among the School’s peers. Since launching this pioneering program, several schools have followed Yale’s lead, including Harvard Law, Stanford Law, and the University of Washington St. Louis School of Law, a trend Dean Heather K. Gerken is working to accelerate.

“I could not be prouder of our Hurst Horizon Scholars,” said Gerken. “They have already accomplished so much, and they’ve changed this place for the better. My hope is that the success of this program will inspire a trend in legal education so that many more students can take the seats they’ve earned and study without fear of punishing debt.”

For Walls, graduating with his J.D. this May was bittersweet. “I really loved being here and having the chance to learn what I wanted to learn,” he said. “[But] learning doesn’t stop after law school, and I am very eager to get out there and start making a difference.”

Over the last seven years, the number of students at Yale Law School who are the first in their families to attend graduate or professional school has increased by 50%; the number of first-generation college students has grown by 80%.

For low-income students, many of whom continue to support their families, need-based scholarships significantly impact which law schools they consider applying to and attending. For these students, family responsibilities can continue well into their careers, and taking on student debt feels untenable. So, too, do careers in the public interest, which are historically undercompensated compared to careers in corporate law.

Need-based scholarships offer students two kinds of freedom: to attend law school and to follow their interests once they arrive.

“What’s often missing from the conversation is that many first-generation, low-income college students shoulder the responsibility of lifting their families out of generational poverty — a challenge that can be difficult to meet while pursuing public interest careers,” said Trinh Q. Truong ’27, a first-year Hurst Horizon Scholar.

From the time she was old enough, Truong worked alongside her mother to support her family — throughout high school, college, and graduate school.

Now, for the first time in her life, Truong can study without financial strain. “I feel incredibly privileged to no longer have to choose between following my passion and fulfilling my commitments to my family’s stability. The scholarship takes the pressure off both me and my mother,” she said.

“One of the greatest indignities of poverty is how it limits your choices and the dreams you can have for yourself, especially when you’re committed to supporting your family,” she added. “With the Hurst Horizon Scholarship, my aspirations are no longer entirely constrained by practical considerations. The most exciting part of law school is simply being a student again — exploring new issues and practice areas without constantly asking myself, ‘What will this be good for?’ or ‘How will this decision help my family?’”

Truong is a student intern for the Worker and Immigrant Rights Advocacy Clinic (WIRAC) and exploring issues in criminal law and capital punishment, while also gaining insights into policymaking at the national level. “In short, I’m living out the dreams I had for myself when I decided at six years old that I would become a lawyer to try and make the world a better place,” she said.

Justin Lutz ’26 hails from rural Alabama and was the first in his family to graduate high school. His interest in the law began at 15, when he spoke at his mother’s parole hearing. He spent a decade working on voting rights and prison reform in his home state before he decided to pursue a career in the law.

At the time, Lutz was working full-time and homeschooling his younger brother, so he could only study for the LSAT in his spare moments. He applied only to law schools that offered expansive scholarships. “I wanted to [attend] somewhere that wouldn’t make me sacrifice the support I was sending to my parents,” he said. When he was accepted at Yale, Lutz questioned whether he’d be able to attend.

“Giving someone from a low-income [background] an offer of admission with no financial aid can be a soft no,” he said. “It changed everything when [Admissions] Dean [Miriam] Ingber said I might qualify for the scholarship. Getting in to Yale Law School is its own gift, but getting in and not having to take on $200,000 of debt allows you to focus on your studies and only worry about that.”

Lutz leapt into life at law school. He sits on the board and co-leads Yale Law School’s First-Generation Professionals student organization. He is a research assistant for Professor Judith Resnik and Senior Research Scholar Emily Bazelon. Last year, he made it to the semifinals of the Barristers’ Union Mock Trial.

Gerken worked to build the Hurst Horizon Scholarship with the help of alumni and founding donors Soledad ’92 and Robert Hurst, David ’78 and Patricia Nierenberg, and Gene ’73 and Carol Ludwig. In its three years, the Hurst Horizon Scholarship has had an outsized impact at Yale Law School and beyond, bolstering an already robust financial aid program that is among the most generous in the country. Each year, through careful fiscal stewardship and the generosity of donors, the Law School spends more than 20 million dollars from its endowment income alone to fund need-based financial aid, which ensures that more than 70% of Yale Law students receive generous financial aid packages that significantly lower the cost of attendance.

Yet Yale remains one of only two schools in the country that provide aid solely based on financial need and there remains much more work to be done to expand access to legal education nationwide.

Across the board, many law schools still use financial aid to attract applicants with the highest LSAT scores and most competitive profiles to compete in misguided rankings systems like that of the U.S. News & World Report.

As Gerken wrote in the Chronicle of Higher Education in 2023, in the period between 2005 and 2010, the last year for which the American Bar Association offers data on merit versus need-based aid, “$230 million was pumped into merit scholarships ... while only $23 million was allocated for need-based aid — one-tenth the amount.”

As a result, far too many low-income students who earn their seats cannot afford to take them. That was one major reason why Yale Law School led an exodus from the U.S. News rankings in 2022, sparking a movement: more than 60 other law schools followed suit.

“If we want the legal profession to be open to all, we simply have to do more,” said Gerken. “We left the U.S. News rankings to move the needle on this critical issue, and I’m heartened to see change is happening. But the most powerful evidence for the importance of need-based aid is the Hurst Horizon Scholars themselves. They are immensely talented, passionate lawyers who will make an enormous difference in the legal field and in their communities. I will not rest until legal education does more to kick open the gates to this profession.”

No one embodies this spirit of change-making more than Alphonse Simon ’24, who received Hurst Horizon Scholarships during his final two years of law school and is now thriving as an associate attorney at a law firm in the Bay Area.

The program inspired him to pay it forward, and in 2023, while still in law school, he started a nonprofit called Fighting for Fairness that helps low-income students with law school preparation.

Simon said the financial support is meaningful for students in more ways than one. Not only does it allow them to pursue the careers they want, but it also provides them with a sense of community while at law school. And it offers symbolic recognition of what it takes for low-income students to get to schools like Yale. “So many Hurst Horizon students come in feeling like they don’t belong here, or [because] they have struggles their classmates don’t see, those struggles make them lesser than their colleagues,” said Simon. “In fact, it makes them special. It gives them more confidence.”

Tyler Walls believes a sea of change in how law schools award financial aid dollars will lead to systemic changes in communities.

“I think it’ll end up being the case that a lot of folks will go back to their communities and effect change for the public good. Public interest law people have an interest in making change for their communities,” he said. “Where I’m from, a lot of people don’t end up at institutions like Yale. I see a lot of pride when I go back home and talk to folks I’ve grown up with and they acknowledge it’s been a struggle to get here, but also [that] things can change, things don’t need to stay the same as they were.”

The Law School, itself, has changed — for the better.

Lutz said Hurst Horizon Scholars come to law school with valuable perspectives, sometimes as people who have been directly impacted by the law, versus experiencing it as an abstract concept, and classroom discussions are the better for it. And the benefits ripple outward.

“The education is mine, but the impact belongs to my family and community. It goes so much further than one person,” he said. “The Hurst Horizon Scholarship could be the thing that breaks the intergenerational cycle of poverty for my family.”