Kim Kardashian West is headed to court.
She revealed in a new Vogue profile on Wednesday that she's studying to become a lawyer after her advocacy for criminal justice reform. Kardashian West is in the middle of a four-year apprenticeship with a California law firm and plans to take the bar exam in 2022. This involves committing to 18 hours of supervised study a week, something she said she has been doing since July. On the day of the interview, she had a four-hour block of studying on her schedule.
Kardashian West said she was motivated by her experience with Alice Marie Johnson, a woman who was sentenced to life in prison for a nonviolent drug offense. Kardashian West visited the White House last year and convinced President Trump to commute Johnson's sentence.
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"Seeing a really good result" in this case inspired Kardashian West, she told Vogue, and made her realize how much more good she could do if she had a legal background.
"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, s--t,'" she said. "I need to know more ... 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.”
While the Vogue profile notes that she knew this news "would be met with an eye roll," Van Jones, who has been working with Kardashian West on criminal justice reform, said that when it came to the Johnson case, Kardashian West delivered the "most effective, emotionally intelligent intervention that I’ve ever seen in American politics."
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