{"id":138172,"date":"2025-12-04T14:40:31","date_gmt":"2025-12-04T22:40:31","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/xira.com\/p\/2025\/12\/04\/actually-kim-kardashian-is-the-best-argument-for-the-bar-exam\/"},"modified":"2025-12-04T14:40:31","modified_gmt":"2025-12-04T22:40:31","slug":"actually-kim-kardashian-is-the-best-argument-for-the-bar-exam","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/xira.com\/p\/2025\/12\/04\/actually-kim-kardashian-is-the-best-argument-for-the-bar-exam\/","title":{"rendered":"Actually, Kim Kardashian Is The Best Argument FOR The Bar Exam"},"content":{"rendered":"

In The Washington Post<\/em>, NYU adjunct professor Max Raskin advances the entirely defensible claim that the bar exam is a cartel instrument designed to keep prices high, outsiders out, and the whole profession wrapped in the same warm, self-satisfied delusion that making future securities lawyers memorize the Rules of Evidence has ever, even once, identified who will be a competent lawyer. <\/p>\n

Fair enough. Totally agree on that front. The bar exam is a flaming sack of Scantron-bubbled garbage.<\/p>\n

But the headline and hook? \u201cHow the bar exam failed Kim Kardashian<\/a>\u201d is just\u2026 no. No, we\u2019re not doing this. We\u2019re not hoisting Kim Kardashian upon the cross of professional licensure reform. The only good argument FOR the bar exam is Kim Kardashian.<\/p>\n

Unfortunately, an essay on the futility of the bar exam and the desperate need for states to develop alternatives to a generalist memory test for a profession of specialists probably doesn\u2019t grab the attention of the Washington Post<\/em> and certainly not the attention of the public at large. But with one of the most \u2014 if inexplicably so \u2014 famous people in the world grafted onto the polemic, it stands a chance of reaching a broader audience. And so this piece is framed around Kardashian\u2019s quixotic and confusing quest for esquireship. But not all publicity is good publicity and tying the fight against the bar exam to Kim Kardashian does more harm than good. <\/p>\n

She\u2019s not Our Lady of Perpetuities, she\u2019s a reality star without an undergrad degree<\/em> \u2014 let alone a law degree \u2014 trying to shortcut into a law license to perform admittedly good work that she already does without being a lawyer anyway<\/a>! Kardashian\u2019s work supporting challenges to wrongful convictions and relief from excessive sentences doesn\u2019t need another lawyer, it needs a billionaire to bankroll a bunch of lawyers.<\/p>\n

But she does not make a sympathetic figure for bar reform. If anything, the public sees a billionaire dilettante cutting corners. Say what you will about Elle Woods, but she actually went to Harvard. This isn\u2019t meant to diminish the work that Kardashian\u2019s put into this effort. Her \u201creading the law\u201d pathway absolutely involves real work, and is a time-honored pathway harkening back to the days before law schools metastasized into debt factories. But we\u2019re trying to persuade the public that the bar exam fails to effectively vet future lawyers and \u201cit kept out that rich woman from TV who never went to college\u201d strikes most people as the bar exam doing its job<\/em>.<\/p>\n

The fundamental problem with Raskin\u2019s broadside against the bar exam because he goes beyond bashing the bar exam as a bad test to questioning the need for professional licensing at all. Kardashian is a flawed hero for bar exam reform, but fits into an argument for a world of no licensing at all. <\/p>\n

\n

The bar exam, the Law School Admission Test and law school itself are the price you pay for joining a government-protected legal guild \u2014 no different from taxi medallions or liquor licenses. It is essentially illegal to represent someone else in court without passing this test, which is an exception to the general rule that people should be allowed to hire whomever they want without the government\u2019s permission.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

No, being a lawyer is not the same as running a bar. An incompetent lawyer leaves clients in financial ruin or prison, while an incompetent bartender leaves clients with a subpar martini. The free market can sort out bad bartenders over time, but it doesn\u2019t do much for the guy serving 25 to life while the rest of the market catches up on the lawyer\u2019s Yelp reviews. Many jobs don\u2019t require expensive licensing. Attorney is not one of them. <\/p>\n

The Uber-fication of legal gives real \u201clibertarian startup pitch deck\u201d energy. And I\u2019m still trying to figure out how justice doesn\u2019t end in truly vicious surge pricing in this model.<\/p>\n

\n

Many empirical studies<\/a>\u00a0question the effectiveness of the bar exam in predicting lawyerly prowess, but this should be settled by a free market. We don\u2019t make auto mechanics or electricians go to school for an additional three years, even though their professions can cause much more physical harm. We rely on credentials, social signaling, reviews and other market mechanisms for determining quality.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

But\u2026 we do. We don\u2019t have an \u201cadditional three years\u201d of school for either of those jobs, but we do have schools for them. We\u2019ve had a national level push toward trade schools since the tail end of the Obama administration. There are also accepted licensing procedures for both. Auto mechanics are certified through an industry test<\/a>, and even though the government isn\u2019t running that test, many jurisdictions require passage of the industry test to perform key tasks as a mechanic. Electricians, on the other hand, absolutely do get state licenses. Every state requires some sort of electrician certification.<\/p>\n

\n

The best defense of this system is that while it is not necessary to memorize the arcane rule against perpetuities to be a competent lawyer because you can always use Google, the temperament of the person who has the sitzfleisch to study for these exams is the kind of person who makes an effective lawyer.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Hopefully lawyers are not doing critical legal research with Google. But, yes, the bar exam expects applicants to answer doctrinal questions about areas of law they don\u2019t specialize in from snap memory, which in real world is what we would call \u201cmalpractice.\u201d It is a goofy stand in for \u201cthe kind of person who makes an effective lawyer.\u201d You know what might be a better stand in for the kind of person with the temperament to engage in grueling legal study? A LAW SCHOOL.<\/p>\n

This is why diploma privilege, coupled with more rigorous standards for law schools to actually turn out graduates capable of doing the job \u2014 as opposed to collecting their tuition dollars and wishing them luck on the bar exam \u2014 makes for the best licensing model. You know, sort of like the one Wisconsin figured out ages ago.<\/p>\n

Which is, again, why the best defense of the bar exam is\u2026 Kim Kardashian. The only defensible purpose of an additional written test of legal knowledge is to vet someone who decided to skip out on law school. This test doesn\u2019t have to be the current bar exam. In fact, it should be something more closely resembling Utah\u2019s new proposed written test, which focuses on skills and aims to be something that a competent, currently practicing lawyer could pass without any studying<\/a>. If we\u2019re testing minimum competence, then existing practitioners should by default be able to pass with ease or there\u2019s something even more desperately wrong.<\/p>\n

\n

Lawyers are not doctors, so more experimentation in the legal profession can be tolerated. Lawyers are not constantly making life-or-death decisions, and when they do, there are procedures to ensure that counsel is competent. Run-of-the-mill contract review and regulatory filings, however, don\u2019t warrant a licensure scheme.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Seriously? Yes, lawyers are not doctors, but this is a country that convicts people of murder when their lawyer falls asleep in court<\/a>. So pardon us for being a tad skeptical of the \u201cprocedures to ensure that counsel is competent.\u201d Obviously, law school and the bar exam didn\u2019t protect that client, but it underscores how something<\/em> needs to be in place before opening the door to every rando because a \u201ckill them all and let God sort them out\u201d approach to the market will, in fact, kill a lot of people while the market sorts it out. And that goes for victims of companies concealing their work with fraudulent regulatory filings as much as for wrongfully convicted defendants. <\/p>\n

\n

This is especially true in light of advances in artificial intelligence.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Stop.<\/p>\n

\n

AI systems already draft wills, nondisclosure agreements, term sheets, employment contracts and regulatory memos at associate-level quality.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

No, they don\u2019t<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\n

There are those who point to the occasional lawyer who doesn\u2019t check hallucinated citations and embarrasses himself in court, but these are exceptions. The vast majority of lawyers who use AI don\u2019t want to admit it for the same reason doctors don\u2019t want to admit to Googling symptoms, so there is a negative selection bias where\u00a0stories of federal judges<\/a>\u00a0sloppily using AI catch more attention than routine use of the tool.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

This, however, is true. AI is not doing associate level work unless you happen to work with really terrible associates. AI drafts documents that look<\/em> like associate-level work. Which, in its defense, is still extremely useful and AI can do valuable work when drafting based off a well-curated knowledge base. Coupled with a competent attorney, AI can make the start-to-finish legal workflow much faster. Lawyers (or judges<\/a>) who don\u2019t check AI are the real problem, not the technology itself. But don\u2019t let the technology totally off the hook. The acceleration of the workflow<\/a> creates the conditions for disaster, compressing those moments of pause where lawyers engage in the iterative and collaborative processes that refine (and sometimes completely reorient) the work.<\/p>\n

Someone competent needs to be on the other end of this or it\u2019s just an express lane to legal slop. The public should feel confident that the smooth talker they\u2019ve hired will be that competent thinker. If anything, the expansion of legal AI makes the need for an agreed upon certification process more dire because work product is going to get more homogenized with everyone using the same LLMs and human editing is going to be the only differentiator. <\/p>\n

Also, doesn\u2019t this whole AI argument cut the opposite direction? If one assumes that AI is a magic box that can do most legal work, the cost of legal work would fall anyway, regardless of its guild-like structure. In this hypothetical world, lawyers are churning out drafts with a fraction of the human staff. Flooding the market with more untrained attorneys lacks the price-busting power it would have in a pre-AI world.<\/p>\n

\n

One of the most nefarious forms of protectionism is the limit on nonlawyers being partners in law firms. This rule prevents specialization, which is the cornerstone of economic order. Why would someone think that a lawyer who has trained in a narrow field would be good at firm operations or marketing or hiring? In most other industries, chief technology officers deal with tech, chief operation officers deal with operations and hiring is with human resources. But in law firms, essentially all the ultimate decision-makers must be lawyers. Kim Kardashian could surely run a more efficient marketing department than a white-shoe firm.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Law firms already hire chief technology officers. There\u2019s nothing about the limit on non-lawyer ownership that prevents building out a non-lawyer C-Suite. Whether it\u2019s a good idea to let private equity funds run law firms or not is a debate, but it\u2019s not what prevents firms from hiring specialist officers.<\/p>\n

\n

These rules are marketed as protecting justice when they really protect incumbents. Over the past decade,\u00a0legal costs have risen<\/a>\u00a0by about twice the rate of inflation, while technology should have driven costs down.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

True, though lawyers are just catching up<\/a> after running below inflation for years. We ideally want legal costs lower and more accessible while lawyers make their nut on technology assisted volume, but we also need some way to assure the public \u2014 before they end up in prison \u2014 that the lawyer they\u2019re talking to is competent. The bar exam is a horrible mechanism for this. Law school is better. <\/p>\n

Which brings us back to Kim Kardashian. The bar exam isn\u2019t failing Kim Kardashian. It\u2019s failing the law school graduates who more than meet any reasonable standard of \u201cminimum competence\u201d because the test is administered as a quantity control mechanism for the profession. But Kardashian isn\u2019t a law school graduate who completed a course of study at an accredited institution. She\u2019s the exact reason the public thinks a test like the bar exam is necessary in the first place. <\/p>\n

Kill the bar exam tomorrow, replace it with statewide supervised-practice pathways, tighten accreditation oversight, and give diploma privilege to schools that produce actually competent graduates. Then reserve the exam \u2014 a better one, not the dumpster fire we have now \u2014 for the narrow slice of candidates not covered by those systems.<\/p>\n

We don\u2019t need to abolish a written exam because<\/em> it was unfair to Kim Kardashian. We need to abolish the exam because it\u2019s unfair to everyone else. But we absolutely need some kind of licensing.<\/p>\n

\n

\"Headshot\"Joe Patrice<\/a>\u00a0is a senior editor at Above the Law and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer<\/a>. Feel free to\u00a0email<\/a> any tips, questions, or comments. Follow him on\u00a0Twitter<\/a>\u00a0or Bluesky<\/a> if you\u2019re interested in law, politics, and a healthy dose of college sports news. Joe also serves as a Managing Director at RPN Executive Search<\/a>.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

The post Actually, Kim Kardashian Is The Best Argument FOR The Bar Exam<\/a> appeared first on Above the Law<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/figure>\n

In The Washington Post<\/em>, NYU adjunct professor Max Raskin advances the entirely defensible claim that the bar exam is a cartel instrument designed to keep prices high, outsiders out, and the whole profession wrapped in the same warm, self-satisfied delusion that making future securities lawyers memorize the Rules of Evidence has ever, even once, identified who will be a competent lawyer. <\/p>\n

Fair enough. Totally agree on that front. The bar exam is a flaming sack of Scantron-bubbled garbage.<\/p>\n

But the headline and hook? \u201cHow the bar exam failed Kim Kardashian<\/a>\u201d is just\u2026 no. No, we\u2019re not doing this. We\u2019re not hoisting Kim Kardashian upon the cross of professional licensure reform. The only good argument FOR the bar exam is Kim Kardashian.<\/p>\n

Unfortunately, an essay on the futility of the bar exam and the desperate need for states to develop alternatives to a generalist memory test for a profession of specialists probably doesn\u2019t grab the attention of the Washington Post<\/em> and certainly not the attention of the public at large. But with one of the most \u2014 if inexplicably so \u2014 famous people in the world grafted onto the polemic, it stands a chance of reaching a broader audience. And so this piece is framed around Kardashian\u2019s quixotic and confusing quest for esquireship. But not all publicity is good publicity and tying the fight against the bar exam to Kim Kardashian does more harm than good. <\/p>\n

She\u2019s not Our Lady of Perpetuities, she\u2019s a reality star without an undergrad degree<\/em> \u2014 let alone a law degree \u2014 trying to shortcut into a law license to perform admittedly good work that she already does without being a lawyer anyway<\/a>! Kardashian\u2019s work supporting challenges to wrongful convictions and relief from excessive sentences doesn\u2019t need another lawyer, it needs a billionaire to bankroll a bunch of lawyers.<\/p>\n

But she does not make a sympathetic figure for bar reform. If anything, the public sees a billionaire dilettante cutting corners. Say what you will about Elle Woods, but she actually went to Harvard. This isn\u2019t meant to diminish the work that Kardashian\u2019s put into this effort. Her \u201creading the law\u201d pathway absolutely involves real work, and is a time-honored pathway harkening back to the days before law schools metastasized into debt factories. But we\u2019re trying to persuade the public that the bar exam fails to effectively vet future lawyers and \u201cit kept out that rich woman from TV who never went to college\u201d strikes most people as the bar exam doing its job<\/em>.<\/p>\n

The fundamental problem with Raskin\u2019s broadside against the bar exam because he goes beyond bashing the bar exam as a bad test to questioning the need for professional licensing at all. Kardashian is a flawed hero for bar exam reform, but fits into an argument for a world of no licensing at all. <\/p>\n

\n

The bar exam, the Law School Admission Test and law school itself are the price you pay for joining a government-protected legal guild \u2014 no different from taxi medallions or liquor licenses. It is essentially illegal to represent someone else in court without passing this test, which is an exception to the general rule that people should be allowed to hire whomever they want without the government\u2019s permission.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

No, being a lawyer is not the same as running a bar. An incompetent lawyer leaves clients in financial ruin or prison, while an incompetent bartender leaves clients with a subpar martini. The free market can sort out bad bartenders over time, but it doesn\u2019t do much for the guy serving 25 to life while the rest of the market catches up on the lawyer\u2019s Yelp reviews. Many jobs don\u2019t require expensive licensing. Attorney is not one of them. <\/p>\n

The Uber-fication of legal gives real \u201clibertarian startup pitch deck\u201d energy. And I\u2019m still trying to figure out how justice doesn\u2019t end in truly vicious surge pricing in this model.<\/p>\n

\n

Many empirical studies<\/a>\u00a0question the effectiveness of the bar exam in predicting lawyerly prowess, but this should be settled by a free market. We don\u2019t make auto mechanics or electricians go to school for an additional three years, even though their professions can cause much more physical harm. We rely on credentials, social signaling, reviews and other market mechanisms for determining quality.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

But\u2026 we do. We don\u2019t have an \u201cadditional three years\u201d of school for either of those jobs, but we do have schools for them. We\u2019ve had a national level push toward trade schools since the tail end of the Obama administration. There are also accepted licensing procedures for both. Auto mechanics are certified through an industry test<\/a>, and even though the government isn\u2019t running that test, many jurisdictions require passage of the industry test to perform key tasks as a mechanic. Electricians, on the other hand, absolutely do get state licenses. Every state requires some sort of electrician certification.<\/p>\n

\n

The best defense of this system is that while it is not necessary to memorize the arcane rule against perpetuities to be a competent lawyer because you can always use Google, the temperament of the person who has the sitzfleisch to study for these exams is the kind of person who makes an effective lawyer.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Hopefully lawyers are not doing critical legal research with Google. But, yes, the bar exam expects applicants to answer doctrinal questions about areas of law they don\u2019t specialize in from snap memory, which in real world is what we would call \u201cmalpractice.\u201d It is a goofy stand in for \u201cthe kind of person who makes an effective lawyer.\u201d You know what might be a better stand in for the kind of person with the temperament to engage in grueling legal study? A LAW SCHOOL.<\/p>\n

This is why diploma privilege, coupled with more rigorous standards for law schools to actually turn out graduates capable of doing the job \u2014 as opposed to collecting their tuition dollars and wishing them luck on the bar exam \u2014 makes for the best licensing model. You know, sort of like the one Wisconsin figured out ages ago.<\/p>\n

Which is, again, why the best defense of the bar exam is\u2026 Kim Kardashian. The only defensible purpose of an additional written test of legal knowledge is to vet someone who decided to skip out on law school. This test doesn\u2019t have to be the current bar exam. In fact, it should be something more closely resembling Utah\u2019s new proposed written test, which focuses on skills and aims to be something that a competent, currently practicing lawyer could pass without any studying<\/a>. If we\u2019re testing minimum competence, then existing practitioners should by default be able to pass with ease or there\u2019s something even more desperately wrong.<\/p>\n

\n

Lawyers are not doctors, so more experimentation in the legal profession can be tolerated. Lawyers are not constantly making life-or-death decisions, and when they do, there are procedures to ensure that counsel is competent. Run-of-the-mill contract review and regulatory filings, however, don\u2019t warrant a licensure scheme.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Seriously? Yes, lawyers are not doctors, but this is a country that convicts people of murder when their lawyer falls asleep in court<\/a>. So pardon us for being a tad skeptical of the \u201cprocedures to ensure that counsel is competent.\u201d Obviously, law school and the bar exam didn\u2019t protect that client, but it underscores how something<\/em> needs to be in place before opening the door to every rando because a \u201ckill them all and let God sort them out\u201d approach to the market will, in fact, kill a lot of people while the market sorts it out. And that goes for victims of companies concealing their work with fraudulent regulatory filings as much as for wrongfully convicted defendants. <\/p>\n

\n

This is especially true in light of advances in artificial intelligence.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Stop.<\/p>\n

\n

AI systems already draft wills, nondisclosure agreements, term sheets, employment contracts and regulatory memos at associate-level quality.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

No, they don\u2019t<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\n

There are those who point to the occasional lawyer who doesn\u2019t check hallucinated citations and embarrasses himself in court, but these are exceptions. The vast majority of lawyers who use AI don\u2019t want to admit it for the same reason doctors don\u2019t want to admit to Googling symptoms, so there is a negative selection bias where\u00a0stories of federal judges<\/a>\u00a0sloppily using AI catch more attention than routine use of the tool.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

This, however, is true. AI is not doing associate level work unless you happen to work with really terrible associates. AI drafts documents that look<\/em> like associate-level work. Which, in its defense, is still extremely useful and AI can do valuable work when drafting based off a well-curated knowledge base. Coupled with a competent attorney, AI can make the start-to-finish legal workflow much faster. Lawyers (or judges<\/a>) who don\u2019t check AI are the real problem, not the technology itself. But don\u2019t let the technology totally off the hook. The acceleration of the workflow<\/a> creates the conditions for disaster, compressing those moments of pause where lawyers engage in the iterative and collaborative processes that refine (and sometimes completely reorient) the work.<\/p>\n

Someone competent needs to be on the other end of this or it\u2019s just an express lane to legal slop. The public should feel confident that the smooth talker they\u2019ve hired will be that competent thinker. If anything, the expansion of legal AI makes the need for an agreed upon certification process more dire because work product is going to get more homogenized with everyone using the same LLMs and human editing is going to be the only differentiator. <\/p>\n

Also, doesn\u2019t this whole AI argument cut the opposite direction? If one assumes that AI is a magic box that can do most legal work, the cost of legal work would fall anyway, regardless of its guild-like structure. In this hypothetical world, lawyers are churning out drafts with a fraction of the human staff. Flooding the market with more untrained attorneys lacks the price-busting power it would have in a pre-AI world.<\/p>\n

\n

One of the most nefarious forms of protectionism is the limit on nonlawyers being partners in law firms. This rule prevents specialization, which is the cornerstone of economic order. Why would someone think that a lawyer who has trained in a narrow field would be good at firm operations or marketing or hiring? In most other industries, chief technology officers deal with tech, chief operation officers deal with operations and hiring is with human resources. But in law firms, essentially all the ultimate decision-makers must be lawyers. Kim Kardashian could surely run a more efficient marketing department than a white-shoe firm.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Law firms already hire chief technology officers. There\u2019s nothing about the limit on non-lawyer ownership that prevents building out a non-lawyer C-Suite. Whether it\u2019s a good idea to let private equity funds run law firms or not is a debate, but it\u2019s not what prevents firms from hiring specialist officers.<\/p>\n

\n

These rules are marketed as protecting justice when they really protect incumbents. Over the past decade,\u00a0legal costs have risen<\/a>\u00a0by about twice the rate of inflation, while technology should have driven costs down.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

True, though lawyers are just catching up<\/a> after running below inflation for years. We ideally want legal costs lower and more accessible while lawyers make their nut on technology assisted volume, but we also need some way to assure the public \u2014 before they end up in prison \u2014 that the lawyer they\u2019re talking to is competent. The bar exam is a horrible mechanism for this. Law school is better. <\/p>\n

Which brings us back to Kim Kardashian. The bar exam isn\u2019t failing Kim Kardashian. It\u2019s failing the law school graduates who more than meet any reasonable standard of \u201cminimum competence\u201d because the test is administered as a quantity control mechanism for the profession. But Kardashian isn\u2019t a law school graduate who completed a course of study at an accredited institution. She\u2019s the exact reason the public thinks a test like the bar exam is necessary in the first place. <\/p>\n

Kill the bar exam tomorrow, replace it with statewide supervised-practice pathways, tighten accreditation oversight, and give diploma privilege to schools that produce actually competent graduates. Then reserve the exam \u2014 a better one, not the dumpster fire we have now \u2014 for the narrow slice of candidates not covered by those systems.<\/p>\n

We don\u2019t need to abolish a written exam because<\/em> it was unfair to Kim Kardashian. We need to abolish the exam because it\u2019s unfair to everyone else. But we absolutely need some kind of licensing.<\/p>\n

\n

\"Headshot\"Joe Patrice<\/a>\u00a0is a senior editor at Above the Law and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer<\/a>. Feel free to\u00a0email<\/a> any tips, questions, or comments. Follow him on\u00a0Twitter<\/a>\u00a0or Bluesky<\/a> if you\u2019re interested in law, politics, and a healthy dose of college sports news. Joe also serves as a Managing Director at RPN Executive Search<\/a>.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In The Washington Post, NYU adjunct professor Max Raskin advances the entirely defensible claim that the bar exam is a cartel instrument designed to keep prices high, outsiders out, and the whole profession wrapped in the same warm, self-satisfied delusion that making future securities lawyers memorize the Rules of Evidence has ever, even once, identified […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":138135,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[16],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-138172","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-above_the_law"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/xira.com\/p\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/12\/Headshot-300x200-ADC0li.jpg?fit=300%2C200&ssl=1","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/xira.com\/p\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/138172","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/xira.com\/p\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/xira.com\/p\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/xira.com\/p\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/xira.com\/p\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=138172"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/xira.com\/p\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/138172\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/xira.com\/p\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/138135"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/xira.com\/p\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=138172"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/xira.com\/p\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=138172"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/xira.com\/p\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=138172"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}