Kim Kardashian may be adding attorney to her list of jobs.
According to a Vogue cover story, the TV personality, mother, wife and beauty entrepreneur has numerous books on tort law in her Los Angeles home.
Kardashian, who has made headlines for helping with criminal justice reform -- including working to get non-violent offender Alice Johnson released from prison -- is studying with two lawyers to become one herself.
The "mentor lawyers," as they are referred to in the Vogue piece, are Jessica Jackson and Erin Haney. Jackson is the national director and co-founder of #cut50, a bipartisan initiative aimed at criminal justice reform. Van Jones, a friend of Kardashian and a Yale-educated attorney, is the other co-founder. Haney recently joined the initiative as the policy director.
“When I came on board, Jessica was like, ‘OK, the other part of our job is we’re going to mentor Kim Kardashian,’ and I was like, ‘Wait, what?!’” Haney said, “But she’s incredible: just the kindest, smartest -- I have been so impressed by everything she’s doing and how committed she is.”
Related: Trump commutes Alice Johnson's sentence after meeting with Kim Kardashian West
Kardashian meets with them regularly to study, building up the required 18 hours of supervised study each week.
“She was spending so much time on this and she would call me at weird hours with questions,” Jackson said, “Finally I was like, ‘Gosh, you’re helping us with commutations; you’re legitimately helpful on motions and stuff; why don’t you just become a lawyer?’”
Credit: Roy Rochlin
Credit: Roy Rochlin
Jackson’s impression of Kardashian went beyond how inquisitive she was.
“With law you have to go through an entire analysis in a language that is so unnatural, and she was able to do that from the very beginning,” Jackson told Vogue. “She has a very calm, very logical way of thinking. She’ll probably go into criminal law. I don’t know if we’ll see her in courtrooms.”
Related: Kim Kardashian on working to help Alice Johnson: ‘I just didn’t want to give up’
Rather than go to law school, Kardashian, as a resident of California, can study the law and apprentice with a practicing attorney. She started a four-year apprenticeship with a law firm in San Francisco last July.
“I had to think long and hard about this...” she said of taking on the apprenticeship.
“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, (expletive). I need to know more. I would say what I had to say, about the human side and why this is so unfair.”
According to Vogue, Kardashian will take the state-administered First-Year Law Students Examination, known as the "baby bar," in June. If she passes, will allow her to study for three more years. She plans on taking the bar in 2022.
“First year of law school you have to cover three subjects: criminal law, torts and contracts,” she said. “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.”
Of her criminal lawyer aspirations, Kardashian indicated it was a natural step based on her criminal justice work.
“It’s never one person who gets things done,” she said. “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.”
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