There ought to be a related unit, the anti-Helen. Measures the Mar-a-Lago style of “beauty” that doesn’t launch ships, it sinks them.
Why would someone do all the work to get a law degree and then not do the last little bit of passing the bar exam?
Someone from California may be able to tell us if Pepperdine is a real college. It’s a “values oriented” private Christian school, which I assume means it lacks academic rigor, but I dunno.
So the “last little bit” may very well have been “most of the journey” for her.
@Ancient_Nerd, it’s not common, but it’s not unheard of either. I recall a classmate of mine at law school who had no intention of passing the bar and practising law as a lawyer. But he was a financial planner, and wanted a more thorough understanding of such things as tax law, wills, trust law, and similar, than the typical financial planning courses and classes (all of which he had taken) could.
Another reason might be someone who sees a law degree as a stepping stone to graduate studies in law, with the intent of becoming a legal researcher, a law professor, or as an editor of casebooks.
I fact checked myself, Pepperdine does seem to be legit. It’s on the ABA list and has an 82% pass rate for the BAR, which isn’t Stanford’s 98.5% but it’s not the dregs either. She’s just in the bottom 18%.
Apparently she took the bar exam in California but did not pass. I am not a lawyer but I understand that’s not unusual; some people take it multiple times before passing, and many study for months to prepare, and this is all after attending law school.
In short, passing the bar exam is hardly “the last little bit.”
Yes, it’s a real college. It’s been around since the 1930s, and its undergraduate program, MBA program, and law program are all reasonably well-regarded. It is usually ranked in the top half to top third of various college ratings (US News, Forbes, etc.).
I’ve known of Pepperdine since the late '70s, and I had not known until today that it was church-affiliated…though, to be fair, the Churches of Christ, with which Pepperdine is affiliated, is a pretty conservative denomination. That said, compared to other conservative Christian groups like various Baptist groups, many of its members identify as Democrats.
So, it seems to me that, despite this, Pepperdine students appear to get a reasonably good education, and unlike schools like Liberty University and Oral Roberts University, they are not as blatantly public about being affiliated with conservative Christian churches.
Also Pepperdine is famous for its campus, supposedly one of the most beautiful in the country.
By her own words, she didn’t try very hard because she was about to travel to China and so she didn’t really care about it. (China doesn’t allow someone to practice law there if they received their license from outside of the country, which of course makes sense; why should China care if California confirms that a person is skilled in United States law?)
Which seems kind of wild to me because it’s not cheap to take the exam, it looks like over $1,000 added up if I’m reading it right.
Not to mention the time and expense to get the degree in the first place.
All that time and money and you just say “fuck it” because you’re going to China.
My guess is that she failed because she wasn’t capable of passing (at least at that time, maybe she could have taken another stab at it later) and is just trying to give the impression that she could have if she wanted to. After all, she’s trying to pretend to have experience and capabilities she clearly does not have.
Those of us of a certain age, and who can remember the Battle of the Network Stars specials in the 1970s, may remember that those competitions were held on Pepperdine’s campus.
(It’s in Malibu, overlooking the Pacific Coast Highway. I visited it once, in the '90s, when I was in the area for work, and yes, it’s gorgeous.)
We don’t know how she did in law school - though clearly she did well enough to earn her J.D. She might well have realized that she wouldn’t have passed the bar easily, or was just more interested in chasing a paycheck at that moment.
Or an alternate theory - she’s also lying about her reasons for failing, just as she’s lied about nearly every detail of the whole imbecilic mess.
“I could have gotten the top score if I wanted but I didn’t want to try very hard” is a stupid but very Trumpian excuse
Pepperdine is old-time conservative but, it is legit. California being a blue state is really pretty recent. We unleashed Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan on the world. Southern California was historically more conservative than the north.