Peter Park became youngest in California to pass bar exam at 17
At 13, as his friends were finishing eighth grade, Peter Park was starting law school. A year later, he was finishing his freshman year finals by day, and passing his first major law school exam by night.
This past July, Park took California’s bar exam, and in November, he became the youngest person in state history to pass at 17, beating the previous record holder — who passed at 18 — according to the Tulare County district attorney’s office, where Park now works. His two younger sisters and parents moved with him three hours north for the job.
On Tuesday, he was sworn in as a deputy district attorney.
“At first it was very intimidating — I had zero knowledge about the law,” Park told The Washington Post. “But now, I pretty much have a 10-year head start. That’s like living 10 years extra. I value that over the traditional high school experience.”
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It started when he was 13, and his father — himself involved with law as a patent agent — came into his room with an idea. The elder Park had read about a 21-year-old who had passed the bar and thought maybe his son could, too.
“Do you want to become an attorney right now?” his father, ByungJoo Park, asked him.
The teen hadn’t really considered it, but the more his dad spoke — about the possibilities law opened up, about how he could help keep people safe as a prosecutor — the better it sounded. Park told his dad he’d think about it.
The next day, he decided he was in. He wasn’t worried about missing out on the perceived fun of high school and eventually college. Pursuing law school felt like he was doing something more important and meaningful with his life.
His dad told him he had to start studying for the College Level Examination Program (CLEP) tests, which, if passed, would allow Park to apply to law school without an undergraduate degree. Park spent the next month teaching himself marketing, the subject of his first test.
After he passed that exam, he took on microeconomics and macroeconomics, then a composition exam, studying for each for just a week, spending hours on YouTube learning the subjects on his own.
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By early 2019, he had passed all the CLEP exams and could start applying to law school while he finished eighth grade. By the time he was starting high school, he had enrolled in a four-year juris doctor program at Northwestern California University School of Law online, using a state rule that allows students who have completed the necessary CLEP exams to apply directly to law school without completing a bachelor’s degree.
Some of his high school classmates would tease Park, asking him if he thought he was above them for skipping ahead, he told The Post. He said he didn’t feel that way, but he did feel drawn to law more than math or other high school subjects. He wanted to help people, he said, and getting a law degree meant he could go into a range of industries, including criminal law, medical law and property law, among others.
“The law is like the fabric of society, it reaches into everyone’s lives,” he said.
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Still, navigating both high school and online law school left little time for sleep.
When asked how he got up to speed with classmates who were a decade older than him, the now 18-year-old Park pointed to another famous autodidact who provided inspiration — Abraham Lincoln.
Lincoln, the son of a Kentucky frontiersman, lacked a formal education but engrossed himself in his studies, and particularly, reading law. So that’s what Park did too.
He read as much as he could, choosing to prioritize his law school work over his high school work. He spent almost every waking hour reading case law or becoming accustomed to legalese, and sometimes didn’t have enough time to finish his math homework.
“I felt confident in doing that because I knew I would gain much more value in putting in time into law than math,” he said.
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Park didn’t tell all his teachers he was going to law school while he attended high school. He didn’t want the attention, especially if it didn’t work out.
According to his father’s plan, halfway through sophomore year of high school, Park could take the California High School Proficiency Exam to graduate at the end of 10th grade. In 2021, Park did just that.
“I get the comment very often: ‘Why not just wait? When do you have fun? Why didn’t you want to get to have the whole high school or college experience?’” Park said. “Everyone else is missing out on the law school experience at such a young age.”
He said he feels others his age are just “chasing fun.”
Park’s father, who also encouraged Park’s younger sisters to buck the traditional high school experience and go to law school in their teens, said he agreed that his son didn’t miss out “on anything.”
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“I think there isn’t much difference between hanging out with college friends, enjoying time with friends at church, and studying with colleagues at the prosecutor’s office,” ByungJoo Park said in an email.
The father had completed a doctorate in Korea in material sciences before moving the family to Japan and then California when Park was 4. He eventually passed the patent bar exam, and now helps Park run a company, in addition to his work as a prosecutor, selling affordable stenography keyboards.
If they stay on their current tracks, Park’s younger sisters will both pass the bar at an age younger than he did, Park said.
On Tuesday, the day of his swearing in, Park walked into a conference room of the district attorney’s office around 3:30 p.m. His father had just come back from Korea, where he was visiting when he’d hurt his back. He wasn’t sure if he was going to be able to make the flight and spent a full day recovering once he arrived back in California. But he was there, watching his son.
As Park took the oath, and looked at his father in the audience, the new prosecutor was proud of the work he’d done over the past four years.
“I have my whole life in front of me,” Park said. “This DA’s office gave me as a 17-year-old a chance. Now I get to prove myself in court.”
correction
An earlier version of this article misstated the name of the College Level Examination Program (CLEP). The article has been corrected.
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