Kim Kardashian West is a reality tv star, a fashion plate, the wife of musician Kayne West – and future lawyer?
Kardashian West announced in Vogue‘s May issue that she has been pursuing a four-year law apprenticeship since last summer and plans to take the bar exam in 2020.
Kardashian West tells the magazine that she has become increasingly involved with criminal justice reform advocates since last year, when she joined CNN commentator and activist Van Jones and several lawyers to meet with President Donald Trump at the White House to ask that he commute the sentence of Alice Marie Johnson, a 63-year-old woman who had been imprisoned in Alabama on a nonviolent drug charge since 1996. Trump commuted Johnson’s sentence last summer.
Kardashian West says she has been working with Jones and attorney Jessica Jackson, the cofounders of bipartisan criminal-justice reform group #cut50.
“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,” 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.”
Although Kardashian West never received a bachelor’s degree, California is among four U.S. states which offer an alternative way to pass the bar: apprenticing with a lawyer or judge, known as “reading the bar.” This summer, Kardashian West is scheduled to take the “baby bar,” a state test which would enable her to continue studying for three years.
Jones told Vogue that while Kardashian West is often presented as a vapid reality star, he was impressed by the way she persuaded the President to listen to their cause about Alice Marie Johnson.
“I watched with my own eyes Trump confess to having tremendous fears of letting somebody out of prison and that person going and doing something terrible, and the impact that that would have on his political prospects,” Jones said to Vogue. “He was visibly nervous about it. And I watched Kim Kardashian unleash the most effective, emotionally intelligent intervention that I’ve ever seen in American politics.”
He argued that while people can be blinded by depictions of Kardashian West, she has been using her visibility for a higher purpose.
“This is the daughter of an accomplished attorney and the mother of three black kids who is using her full power to make a difference on a tough issue and is shockingly good at it,” Jones told the magazine.
