Kim Kardashian West says she is studying to become a criminal-justice lawyer and is planning to take her exams in 2022.
The reality star began a four-year apprenticeship with a law firm in San Francisco last summer, around the time she played a role in the release from prison last summer of Alice Marie Johnson.
The 63-year-old grandmother had been in an Alabama prison on a nonviolent drug charge since 1996, and Kardashian West visited the US president, Donald Trump, at the White House to argue her case. The president eventually granted Johnson clemency.
Discussing her decision to venture into a law career, she told US Vogue: “I had to think long and hard about this. The White House called me to advise to help change the system of clemency, and 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, shit. I need to know more.’
“I would 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. 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.
“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.”
Kardashian West's interest in the law will see her follow in the footsteps of her father, Robert Kardashian, who was a member of OJ Simpson's defence team. She said: "On the weekends they used our home as an office, with Johnnie Cochran and Bob Shapiro. 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. On weekends I would always snoop and look through. I was really nosy about the forensics."
She is now being mentored by two lawyers, Jessica Jackson and Erin Haney, who are helping her log her required 18 hours of weekly supervised study.
Over the summer she will take what is known as the “baby bar” administered by the state of California. If she passes she will be allowed to continue for three more years of study. She said: “First year of law school, you have to cover three subjects: criminal law, torts, and contracts. To me, torts is the most confusing, contracts the most boring, and crim 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.” – PA