Free to Forge Ahead

April 2025

As Landon Hardy prepares to graduate from BYU Law School in just a few weeks, he reflects with deep gratitude on the journey that brought him here and the scholarship that helped make it possible.

“I’m from Texas originally,” he shares. “I grew up in Lubbock—about five hours west of Dallas. My parents were big BYU fans. They actually met here during undergrad, so I always had BYU in the back of my mind. I vaguely had the idea that I wanted to be a lawyer too, just like my dad.”

Hardy’s path to law school began after his undergraduate studies at BYU, where he also met his wife. “We got married the day after my last final,” he says with a laugh. “She still had two years left in her degree, so BYU became our top choice for law school. It just made sense to stay somewhere we both loved.”

What started as a long-held dream became a life-changing reality when Hardy received a call from the dean of BYU Law, personally offering him admission and the Fritz B. Burns Scholarship. “I was thrilled,” he recalls. “Just getting that call during my last semester of undergrad was incredible. I don’t know—it’s hard to even describe how excited we were.”

The Fritz B. Burns Scholarship has supported Hardy all three years of his legal education. The aid has been nothing short of transformative. “It just took so much pressure off,” he says. “We knew we wanted to start a family during law school and having that financial peace of mind made a huge difference. It really made a lot of things possible.”

After graduating, Hardy will clerk for a judge in Salt Lake City for a year before joining the law firm Mortensen & Milne, also based in Salt Lake. “This scholarship gave us the flexibility to make decisions based on what’s best for our family, rather than feeling boxed in by financial constraints,” he explains. “I have friends who are dealing with a lot of debt, and I see how that limits their options. We’ve been really blessed.”

When asked what he would want the donors behind the scholarship to know, Hardy doesn’t hesitate. “Law school, like many graduate programs, comes with a lot of debt and financial insecurity—at a time in your life that’s already a little unstable,” he says. “The Fritz B. Burns Scholarship gave us stability, options, and peace of mind. I’m incredibly grateful.”