Practicing Law and a Love for Learning: Jasmine Stein Akre ’16

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Jasmine Stein Akre ’16

Washington, D.C.

Jasmine Stein Akre ’16 grew up less than ten miles down the road from Wheaton College in Villa Park, Illinois. Nearby Wheaton was an obvious choice for Akre, who’d attended a Christian pre-K–12 school and whose two older sisters also attended the College.

But, she said, “There was so much more to Wheaton than I initially comprehended. In hindsight, that really was such a great option for me.”

Now, Akre lives on the Virginia side of Washington, D.C., with her husband, Tom, and her young son, Theodore, having just wrapped up a clerkship with Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. While she enjoys written and oral advocacy, her drive to serve others and the country motivated her to pursue a law degree at Yale and the superlatives on her LinkedIn profile: stints at global law firm Kirkland & Ellis LLC, and a clerkship with the Honorable Amul R. Thapar of the United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit.

It was at the Christian liberal arts institution in a western suburb of Chicago that Akre caught a vision for how a rooted faith can move mountains, which in this case was a mock trial team that defied the odds.
Not long after starting her freshman year, Akre joined the then-fledgling mock trial team. That too was, in a sense, a natural extracurricular for her. Her mother had coached the high school mock trial team, and Akre had been involved in the activity since elementary school.

But Wheaton’s mock trial team was small—maybe a dozen or so students with two coaches, Brooks Locke ’98 and Diane Michalak. It didn’t have the deep coaching bench of other powerhouse schools like Harvard or the University of Virginia, nor did it have the benefit of a long legacy or robust funding.

Even so, the team practiced with dedication and scrounged together carpools, airfare, and accommodations to compete in mock trial competitions held all around the country. Winning rounds of these would give the team eligibility to compete in the national competition which, to everyone’s surprise, they did. In fact, the team made it to the nationals each year, even placing ninth in 2013.

“No one expected that,” Akre said. “It truly opened my eyes to what a group of motivated, talented people could do, even with few resources.”

Competing in mock trial bolstered Akre’s skills in persuasive writing, public speaking, and leadership, and helped her win an All-American award at the 2016 Nationals in Greenville, North Carolina. But these experiences also brought into focus a larger lesson impressed on her by an institution that esteems the integration of faith and learning.

“When you start with this foundation that there is an intelligent creator—there is a God who created the world and he is revealing his attributes through what you’re studying—that totally changes the way you study subjects, the import and the impact of them,” Akre said.
That foundation has helped Akre maintain a deep sense of meaning in her various roles: as a law school student or law clerk, as a wife and a mom.

“There’s this sense of joy and fulfillment—even if the day-to-day varies—that I’m using my time, talent, and resources to further his kingdom,” she said.