In a recent interview with Vogue, Kim Kardashian West revealed that she’s studying to become a lawyer. This surprising bombshell has prompted many people to wonder just how the Keeping Up With the Kardashians star plans to achieve this. Kim doesn’t have either a college degree or a law degree. Plus her plate’s already so full: she has a beauty business to run, a family to take care of and a popular reality TV show to film.
Well, Kim Kardashian will be taking the bar exam in California—one of four states that provides an alternative method to take the bar exam without a law degree. Kim said she’s already kicked off a four-year apprenticeship last summer with a law firm in San Francisco. Every 18 hours of her days will now be dedicated to studying under the guidance of two mentor lawyers: Erin Haney and Jessica Jackson.
So, what’s Kim’s inspiration?
How did a ‘lawyer bug’ bite her? Kim says she was largely inspired by the “really good results” she was able to achieve in the Alice Marie Johnson’s case. Alice Marie Johnson is a 63-year-old great grandmother who was sentenced to life imprisonment in 1997 for a non-violent drug-related crime. She was granted clemency by President Donald Trump in 2018 after Kim Kardashian met with the president to discuss prison reform.
According to Kim, being in the White House with judges discussing the issue of clemency made her feel out of her depths. Speaking to Vogue magazine, she said
“the white house called me to advise to help change the system of clemency, I’m sitting in the Roosevelt Room with, like, a judge who had sentenced criminals and a lot of really powerful people and I just sat there, like, Oh – I need to know more,”
And so, after giving the decision to pursue a new career a “long and hard” thought, Kim made up her mind.
“It’s never one person who gets things done; it’s always a collective of people, and I’ve always known my role, but I just felt like I wanted to be able to fight for people who have paid their dues to society,”
she says.
“I just felt like the system could be so different, and I wanted to fight to fix it, and if I knew more, I could do more.”
And so far, according to Kim, understanding law concepts haven’t been much of a struggle.
“The reading is what really gets me.” She said “It’s so time-consuming. The concepts I grasp in two seconds.”
She already knows people will say all sorts of negative things about her decision. And they will be wasting their time and energy because Kim says she doesn’t “pay attention to that anymore.” She added,
“I love to be put in a situation where I can have a conversation with someone who might not be inclined to think much of me because I can guarantee they will have a different opinion and understand what’s important to me after they’ve met me.”
