Her Entrance to This Bar at Age 21 Is Very Unusual

As her contemporaries were savoring their right to be admitted to any bar last summer, Jennifer Peters was admitted to the bar.

Peters became one of California’s youngest lawyers ever in July when she passed the state’s grueling bar exam at age 21. She insists, however, that it’s no big deal.

“I’m at this age, and I can’t imagine what it would be like if I was older, so it’s very hard to find it unique,” said Peters, now 22, a graduate of the University of West Los Angeles School of Law in Mar Vista. Peters, who skipped undergraduate studies altogether, starts work this week with a downtown Los Angeles law firm.

The State Bar of California does not keep statistics on the ages of successful test-takers and cannot say for sure whether Peters is the youngest person ever to pass the exam. But Susan Scott, spokeswoman for the bar, agreed that 21 is “exceptionally young.”

There may have been younger lawyers “way back in the days of Abe Lincoln, or before that,” when many states had no minimum age or academic rules governing lawyers, said Nancy Slonim, director of media services of the American Bar Assn. But Peters is “certainly unusual for modern times,” she said.

Peters got on her fast track during high school. While attending Santa Monica Alternative School, she took advanced classes at Santa Monica College and ended up getting her high school diploma at 16. She worked for Mental Health Advocacy Services in downtown Los Angeles as an office assistant, doing clerical work and interviewing disabled clients who were seeking legal advice.

Instead of heading for college, she went to People’s College of Law, a law school in downtown Los Angeles.

After a year at People’s, she transferred to University of West Los Angeles, where, at the dean’s urging, she repeated her first-year courses to get a solid grounding in the law. “I certainly had the time,” Peters said.

She was a law junkie, going to her own classes and then dropping in on others on the same subject just to hear the views and questions of two different professors and two different sets of students.

“I probably sound nuts,” she said, “but I really enjoy listening to the law.”

Graduating in the top quarter of her class last spring, she took the three-day California bar exam, considered one of the most arduous in the country. She remembers feeling confident during the entire exam.

“I felt there was nothing they could present to me that I couldn’t figure out. It was a very unusual feeling (that) lasted over the three days.” Of the 7,007 who took the test, 59.5% passed.

Peters has started work at the firm of Bonne, Jones, Bridges, Mueller & O’Keefe, and will initially concentrate on litigation. She eventually wants to practice business law, where, she said, there is the possibility of preventing full-blown disputes. And she said that she wants to help underdogs and “do some law that . . . is meaningful--helping somebody, not just aiding a firm in making money.”