Kim Kardashian has stepped back from her years-long effort to become a licensed attorney. On the Megyn Kelly Show, the host had a ready response: “Leave the lawyering to the SMART people.”
The clip circulated on the show’s Instagram this week and pulled in more than 8,300 likes. The reaction makes sense. Kelly’s delivery is quick and confident, and the cultural gap between Kardashian’s world and the grinding reality of bar prep is easy comedy. But the full story is a little more layered.
Kim went public with her law ambitions in 2019. She enrolled in California’s “reading the law” program, a lesser-known alternative to traditional law school. Under this path, aspiring attorneys apprentice under licensed lawyers and work toward the same state bar exam as everyone else. It’s not a shortcut. The California bar exam is one of the hardest in the country by pass rate, and the apprenticeship route offers none of the structure a traditional law school provides.
There’s also a preliminary hurdle. Candidates first have to pass the First-Year Law Students’ Examination, known informally as the baby bar. Kim sat for it four times and passed on her fourth attempt in 2021. She was open with her followers about how much the process had pushed her. This wasn’t a publicity project. By any honest reading, it was a serious effort.
The law journey connected to work she’d already been doing for years. Back in 2018, she worked directly with the White House to push for a commutation for Alice Marie Johnson, a woman serving a life sentence for a first-time nonviolent drug offense. Johnson was released. After that, Kim kept going. She took on more cases and partnered with lawyers and advocacy groups to push for sentencing reform. The law studies were her way of deepening that work, of understanding the system from the inside rather than nudging it from the outside.
The full California bar exam is a different kind of challenge. Thousands of law school graduates fail it every year. Kim runs a shapewear business, raises four kids, and lives a very public life. That schedule doesn’t leave much room for the sustained focus bar prep demands. Stepping back looks less like defeat and more like a practical call.
The advocacy work doesn’t need a bar card. The cases and reform campaigns never required a license. What they required was access and a genuine willingness to engage with hard material. Kim has shown both.
What comes next for her legal ambitions isn’t clear. She hasn’t announced any alternative plans, and there’s no sign she’s closing the door entirely. Stepping back from an exam isn’t the same as stepping away from the cause.
Megyn Kelly knows bar prep from experience. She practiced law first. She then shifted into journalism and eventually built the Megyn Kelly Show into a widely distributed podcast. Her line is the kind that gets a crowd going, and it did. Whether it captures the whole picture is another matter.
Kim hasn’t publicly responded to Kelly’s remarks. The full episode is available across major podcast platforms.
The law career may be on pause. The work behind it probably isn’t.
