Reality TV star Kim Kardashian West grabbed headlines last year when she announced that she has decided to become a lawyer.
The professional social media influencer and beauty mogul famous for being famous is set to become a force in the criminal justice reform world. Over the past two years, she has successfully lobbied President Trump, spent time on the phone with legislators and governors, and paid legal bills for people trying to get out of prison.
"I just felt like I wanted to be able to fight for people who have paid their dues to society," Kardashian West told Vogue. "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."
"The first year of law school, you have to cover three subjects: criminal law, torts, and contracts," Kardashian told Vogue. "To me, torts is the most confusing, contracts the most boring, and criminal law I can do in my sleep. Took my first test, I got 100. Super easy for me. The reading is what really gets me. It's so time-consuming. The concepts I grasp in two seconds."
Kardashian West, 39, who does not have an undergraduate degree, won't need to attend law school, since California, along with Virginia, Vermont, and Washington state, doesn't require a law degree as a prerequisite for taking the bar exam.
Instead, the selfie-expert turned aspiring criminal justice lawyer is taking part in a four-year legal apprenticeship under human rights attorney Jessica Jackson. Kardashian works daily on her law studies for a total of 20 hours per week and just completed her first year of the four-year apprenticeship program. The mother of four writes motions, reads transcripts, and does legal research for a criminal justice reform group called #Cut50.
As an apprentice at #Cut50, Kardashian must do at least 18 hours of work for them, five of which have to be supervised. Before the pandemic, Jessica Jackson, one of the group's co-founders, would fly to Los Angeles to study with the reality star, these days, they make do with FaceTime and phone calls.
"I know my role, that I can be there at the end to push it through," Kardashian West said. "I can also be a silent partner. I think it's knowing when to speak out and when not to, and when to privately call," she added. "People think you need to shout it out on social media and shame people into making decisions, but that's not how it is."
Kardashian fans can additionally follow her journey to becoming a criminal-justice advocate on the new documentary "Kim Kardashian West: The Justice Project." which debuted on the Oxygen cable network on April 5.
The feature-length documentary focuses on the cases of the four people Kardashian West believes are facing unfair sentences, Dawn Jackson, Alexis Martin, Momolu Stewart, and David Sheppard.
"I want to help elevate these cases to a national level to effect change, and this documentary is an honest depiction of me learning about the system and helping bring tangible results to justice reform," she said.
At the event organized by the Television Critics Association, Kardashian West was asked how she would respond to criticism that she had attached herself to the cause to burnish her well-known brand.
"I'm very used to criticism, so nothing really fazes me," West said at the event organized by the Television Critics Association.
"I really genuinely just stay focused on the cases and the people," she added. "I'm not doing it for publicity. I really do care."
Given the fact her late father, Robert Kardashian, was a prominent Los Angeles attorney who famously served as a member of O.J. Simpson's legal defense team in 1995, Kardashian's ambitions to become a lawyer aren't so shocking after all.
"My dad had a library, and when you pushed on this wall, there was this whole hidden closet room, with all of his OJ evidence books," she told Vogue of her father, who died in 2003. "On weekends, I would always snoop and look through. I was really nosy about the forensics."
While Kardashian's non-traditional route for earning a lawyer status is uncommon nowadays, the practice of "reading the law" dates from the days of Thomas Jefferson, who, according to a Washington Post story, "became a lawyer in the 1760s after reading the Virginia code under the tutelage of a prominent lawyer and legislator."
Another notable law reader is Abraham Lincoln, who also chose to study the law through an apprenticeship.
"If you are resolutely determined to make a lawyer of yourself, the thing is more than half done already," wrote Lincoln in 1855. "Always bear in mind that your own resolution to succeed is more important than any other one thing."
Nowadays, only three of the 13,084 Californians who took the bar exam in 2015 were educated through "law office study" (and only two of them passed), according to the National Conference of Bar Examiners.
Law reader numbers are unavailable for more recent years, as the 2016 and 2017 NCBE reports note that "California no longer reports statistics for categories with fewer than 11 takers."
Up next in Kardashian's law school adventures is studying for the California baby bar, where she'll need to pass that exam if she wants to continue her studies.
According to her Instagram stories, she's been studying all the time:
"When I even have an hour off, I do all the test questions and practice." What's made the experience more exciting is the test questions that are tailored precisely to her.
The bar prep company, JD Advising, has made a personalized sample Multistate Bar Examination (MBE) questions written all about her and her family.
As she posted on Insta, she loved it, saying, "They gear them towards me and my products — stuff to really help me understand."
Kardashian aims to take the California Bar Exam, one of the hardest in the country in 2022.
