Kim Kardashian is Studying to Become a Lawyer and Doesn’t Even Need a Law Degree

So, apparently if you live in California, you can become a lawyer without even getting a degree. That’s not to say just anyone can become a lawyer. In her totally unexpected career move, Kim revealed in a Vogue interview that she is going a route called “reading the law” to become a lawyer. This means you can take your bar exam (Kim plans to in 2022) if you complete an apprenticeship with a lawyer or judge. In fact, before law degrees became a thing in 1800, this was how everyone became lawyers. Even for a time after law courses were offered in college, people, including Abraham Lincoln, opted to apprentice. California is actually one of only four states where this is possible. Maybe Elle Woods could have skipped the drama and just apprenticed instead.  

After helping free 63-year-old Alice Marie Johnson, who had been in an Alabama prison since 1996 on a nonviolent drug charge, Kim was inspired to learn more about the law. “The White House called me to advise to help change the system of clemency,” she told Vogue. While the outcome was good, she also felt like she couldn’t help as much as she wanted to. “I’m sitting in the Roosevelt Room with, like, a judge who had sentences criminals and a lot of really powerful people and I just sat there, like, Oh, shit. I need to know more. I would say what I had to say, what I had to say about the human side and why this is so unfair, but I had attorneys with me who could back that up with all the facts of the case.”

Kim wants to fight for people who have “paid their dues to society” and help change the system. “If I knew more, I could do more.”

Kim is completing her apprenticeship with a San Francisco law firm and is probably studying longer than any of us college students. Like, 18 hours of studying per week. Kim meets up with her mentors from the firm and they study in a conference room nearby her home. The Vogue interview also revealed that she has actually been studying for about a year already!

This summer Kim will be up for the “baby bar” exam to see if she can keep studying for the next three years for the real one. From the looks of it, she should do just fine. “Took my first test, I got a 100. Super easy for me. The reading is what really gets me. It’s so time-consuming. The concepts I grasp in two seconds.” I don’t know about grasping concepts in two seconds, but tedious reading? I feel you, girl. After her work for the White House, it doesn’t come as a surprise that she says, “crim law, I can do in my sleep.”

Between the recent release of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s biopic, On the Basis of Sex, and this news, I’m feeling all the female court room power and I’m so here for it. 

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