Summary: A former porn star passed the California bar exam this year.
While California has had a lower bar passing rate than it has seen for ten years, at least one woman passed it we might not have expected to, Heather Swift, a 2013 graduate of Western State University College of Law, a little known unranked school that was conveniently close to Los Angeles, where she worked in the pornography industry as Holly Price.
“How did I do it? Because unbeknownst to many, women in the adult industry are intelligent and can matriculate through a cutthroat tier 3 law school, and pass the hardest bar exam in history. Unlike Miriam Weeks [the Duke University freshman who popularized herself as a feminist porn star] I actually did graduate through law school, and I actually did pass the most difficult bar exam on my first attempt. Perhaps society needs to relinquish stereotypes and overcome their jealousy,” she said in a letter written to Above the Law.
Whether or not popular disdain for the porn industry is based on jealousy, or whether it is intelligent to attend an unranked law school in this day and age, passing the California bar is impressive enough, with only 48.6 percent of takers making it. Western State University College of Law is ABA-accredited, but unranked, and though expensive and with poor employment numbers, its bar passage rate did pretty good.