“I love what I do,” says Joan Lukey ’74, practice group leader for complex trial and appellate litigation at Choate Hall & Stewart LLP, and a doyenne of law in Boston. “I can’t imagine a more fulfilling career for me.” Lukey always wanted to be a trial lawyer because, she says, TV made it look so fascinating. “Totally unrealistic, of course, but when I was little I was just enraptured. I was also interested in drama, and the courtroom is the crux of both.”
Lukey describes her father as one of the brightest men she ever knew—but the outbreak of World War II meant he never went to college. After the war, he stayed in the military for another three decades, gradually made more ill by a wartime shrapnel wound.
“This scholarship allowed me to recognize the most important people and the most important institution in my life.” — Joan Lukey
He and her mother, a schoolteacher, were adamant that their children benefit from higher education. They had limited financial resources, and Lukey considers herself highly fortunate to have received a full scholarship to BC Law. “It was so, so helpful to me. I committed then to pay it back someday.”
BC Law was one of the best times of her life, she recalls. “It was such a warm, supportive environment. Later, when I talked with other lawyers about their law school experiences, I was so surprised that they were so different.”
When her father passed away, she established an endowed scholarship in his name, and increased its size with her mother’s death some years later. “I wanted to honor the two most special people I’d ever known,” she says simply.
“BC Law put me in the position to make a contribution like this. This scholarship allowed me to recognize the most important people and the most important institution in my life,” she explains. “I’d encourage others to think about making a financial aid gift like this. To think you could have such a positive impact on someone’s life is wonderful.”