Rabat – Kim Kardashian West, an American reality television star and beauty mogul, made waves by revealing she plans to add “lawyer” to her resume by 2022.
Kardashian can become a lawyer despite not having a college degree as California is one of four states in the US that allows residents to take the bar exam without having graduated from college or law school. Residents can follow a method called “reading the law” instead, meaning they can do a four-year apprenticeship with a lawyer or a law firm instead of taking the traditional pathway through higher education.
Kardashian revealed to Vogue that she began the four-year apprenticeship program last year and has two lawyer mentors who help her study for 18 hours a week at a law firm not far from her home. This summer, Kardashian will take what is known as the “baby bar,” an exam which will deem her eligible or not to continue the apprenticeship for the final 3 years.
The star seems to be on the right track to pass so far; telling the magazine “crim (sic) law I can do in my sleep. 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.”
Kardashian’s decision has surprised some, as the media often paints her as simply a one-dimensional reality star. However, what spurred her to become a lawyer reveals there is more than meets the eye.
In May 2018, Kardashian learned via social media of a 63-year-old grandmother, Alice Marie Johnson, who had been in prison on a nonviolent drug charge since 1996.
The story deeply touched Kardashian. “Here’s a grandmother who took part in her first-time nonviolent offense and received the same sentence as Charles Manson. I just thought, This is so wrong and so bizarre, and how could that be? I sent it to my attorney and said, ‘What can we do?’” she told the magazine.
Kardashian’s desire to help the woman led her to the White House. She arranged a meeting with Donald Trump to discuss prison reform, and after meeting with Kardashian, Trump commuted Johnson’s life sentence.
This ignited Kardashian’s passion for prison reform. “I just felt like I wanted to be able to fight for people who have paid their dues to society,” she 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.”
Even Kardashian’s mother and manager, Kris Jenner, was caught by surprise by her daughter’s decision to commit to four years to becoming a lawyer. “I did not see this one coming.”
However, a passion for criminal law runs in the family. Kardashian’s father, who died in 2003 when she was 23 years old, was famously a member of football player O.J. Simpson’s defense team, while Simpson was on trial for the murder of his ex-wife, one of the most-discussed criminal cases in Hollywood history.
Kardashian explained she was always intensely curious about her father’s work, recalling in her interview: “My dad had a library, and when you pushed on this wall there was this whole hidden closet room, with all of his O.J. evidence books. On weekends I would always snoop and look through. I was really nosy about the forensics.”
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