There’s nothing funny about Kim Kardashian studying to pass the bar

Kim Kardashian West is studying for the California state bar exam so she can be a better advocate for criminal justice reform. She’s facing the same criticism Elle Woods, the protagonist in the 2001 film Legally Blonde, overcame.

There’s an occasional misconception about Woods, played by Reese Witherspoon, that she’s an airhead who stumbles into Harvard Law School. But any true Legally Blonde fan knows that is not the story of Elle Woods. Woods crushed the LSATs with a score of 179, putting her at the top 99.9 percent of test takers. The movie is about her awakening to her own talents and passions, a story Kardashian’s fans hope will be hers too.

Woods arrives at Harvard, where she is dismissed and mocked by her peers and then sexually harassed by a powerful professor. But she does not quit. She pushes ahead and thrives, relying on her wit, her grit, and her network of female supporters, including a champion in a distinguished female professor.

Like Kardashian, Woods discovers a passion for advocacy. In Woods’s case, it’s a client wrongly accused of murder whom her peers have nearly given up on (and had already written off because of her good looks). Woods doesn’t. In a Perry Mason-style court scene, Woods exposes the real killer under intense cross-examination. (The movie is fiction, after all, and meant to be fun to watch.)

Kardashian has been mocked for her involvement in the criminal justice movement in ways familiar to Woods. She was treated as a joke when she lobbied President Trump in the Oval Office (successfully) to grant clemency to Alice Marie Johnson, a great-grandmother who was sentenced to life in prison for a nonviolent drug offense and had already served 20 years in prison.

Twitter scoffed at her, and the New York Post ran two headlines on one front page referencing her rear end:

This is not typical treatment for a celebrity advocate — whether it’s Bono testifying on the state of AIDS resources, Brad Pitt meeting with Barack Obama and Nancy Pelosi on sustainable housing, or Ashley Judd taking on saving wolves.

Instead of being cowed, Kardashian is shoring up her bona fides. She is attempting to become a lawyer without a degree from college or law school, which are not requirements to sit for the notoriously difficult California bar. She’s planning to spend the next few years studying and preparing, while keeping up her work as an entrepreneur and reality TV icon and fulfilling family commitments. (Critics point out that Kardashian has limitless resources, so her dream is not one easily followed by a typical mother of three with a full-time job. Woods came from wealth too, and didn’t worry about student loans or making ends meet.)

Still, Kardashian is making a choice to put in the work to become a better advocate, and she is being criticized for it. In a post on Instagram this week, Kardashian said, “One person actually said I should ‘stay in my lane.” Woods was told by her own father and her ex-boyfriend that maybe she should give up too — plan parties, be a socialite, be beautiful. None of those are in themselves bad things. But a woman who wants to use her significant profile and fortune to change the world should be encouraged to go for it — not held back.

Millions of Kardashian’s fans, meanwhile, are eager to support her:

Woods graduates from Harvard and goes on to work for a congresswoman in Legally Blonde 2, a clear sign of success. Kardashian is still slogging through the original. Passing the California bar is difficult for even law school graduates, so her task is a big one. Regardless of whether she pulls it off, she’ll still become a better advocate in learning about the law. Woods’s story, too, is really about rejecting her critics to recognize that she has it in her to do good work.

As Woods put it in her speech at graduation: “It is with passion, courage of conviction, and strong sense of self that we take our next steps into the world, remembering that first impressions are not always correct. You must always have faith in people. And most importantly, you must always have faith in yourself.”

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