Grand Canyon University government professors wouldn’t be surprised to see the latest news about one of its youngest alumna.
Kaylee May Law, who graduated from GCU at age 17 with a bachelor’s degree in government with an emphasis in legal studies in May 2023, was sworn into the Walnut (Calif.) City Council on Dec. 11, making her one of the youngest Asian Americans elected to public office in the U.S., according to CBS.
It took her just over a year after her GCU graduation to earn a master’s degree in government at Johns Hopkins University. Her latest youngest-ever designation comes from a person who began taking community college courses at age 13 at the urging of her mother, who just wanted her to stay busy.
“Pick something fun, I’m thinking, like ceramics,” Janel Law told the CBS Los Angeles affiliate. “She picked logic.”
Law told GCU News that there’s no secret to early blooming.
“I put in the work in everything I do. I don’t think it’s impossible for others to do something similar,” she said. “I started at a young age, and I am going to keep going and I am not going to just stop.”
When she filed papers to run for the nonpartisan city council seat in her hometown, she went about it like you would expect.
“I wanted to run a grassroots campaign – so lots and lots of knocking on doors,” she said. “It’s more personable than sending a flyer in the mail or robocalling; face-to-face contact is always the best.
“A lot of people said no one has ever come to their door before.”
Law estimates she knocked on nearly 5,000 doors in the community of roughly 27,000 residents just outside Los Angeles.
She told them her vision of keeping the vibrant community safe and maintaining and improving its quality of life as a resident who also served on the board of nonprofits for Chinese Americans and for the poor.
“I lived my entire life here,” said Law, who did her university work online. “It’s really a great community. We have a lot of green space, it’s vibrant and natural with a lot of trails. I can go for a walk with my parents or a bike ride with my brother and everyone says, ‘Hi.’ It’s very friendly and personable with a great sense of community.”
She ran for the four-year term against six others to fill three seats on the campaign slogan, “Law is on your side.”
Law turned 19 only three days prior to the election, and after she won, honored her grandfather, Fat Law, who died just a month before the election. She told local media that his sacrifice coming to the U.S. from Hong Kong with a sixth-grade education to eventually own a restaurant business was a great example of hard work and sacrifice.
She is setting aside a possible future as an attorney to serve as the youngest public official in California, according to the city’s research.
“I don’t get paid much, if anything at all. It’s like gas money. This is literally community service, but you get to see the impact, the difference you made. That’s very visible in local government.”
Nothing, it seems, is beyond Law’s hard-working reach.
After all, she called research for her Johns Hopkins thesis on the Supreme Court’s Chevron decision “enjoyable.”
The Supreme Court in June ended the Chevron deference. So instead of deferring to agencies' expertise on how to interpret ambiguous language in laws pertaining to their work, federal judges now have the power to decide what a law means for themselves.
“It’s something I am passionate about, so that takes the burnout or the stress away from me,” she said. “If you truly love what you do, it doesn’t seem like work.”
Grand Canyon University senior writer Mike Kilen can be reached at [email protected]
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