15-year-old gears up for law school

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A 15-year-old Mississippi kid is planning to begin law school later this year, giving him the opportunity to be one of the youngest people ever to earn a juris doctorate.

According to a report from the local station WLOX, James "Jimmy" Chilimigras took the law school entrance exam last year at the age of 14 and scored 174, the highest tally in his home state, Alabama, and Louisiana.

Chilimigras who has a bachelor and masters degree in accounting from the online, non-profit Western Governors University, said as quoted by WLOX that he will decide which law school to attend in May. "I'm going to be law school in August - that's going to be in person, so that's exciting, [and] I'm really looking forward to that, actually," he stated.

In the United States, law school normally lasts three years. If Chilimigras completes his education in that time range, he will be one of the world's youngest law school graduates, as per the history and culture website oldest.org.

In 2005, Kelly Yang of China was the world's eighth-youngest law school graduate, graduating at the age of 20 from Harvard University. According to Oldest.org, the world's youngest known law school graduate is Stephen Baccus of Florida, who graduated from the University of Miami at the age of 16 in 1986.

Some of the people on oldest.org's list did not go on to become lawyers. Yang went on to become a columnist for the South China Morning Post, and Baccus went on to become a neuroscience professor.

Chilimigras said as quoted by WLOX that they recognized their son's intelligence early on. He began speaking in complete phrases at the age of two and graduated from St. John Paul the Great High School in Bay St Louis at the unusually young age of twelve.

“We always knew he was bright, but I don’t think we expected he would accomplish so much so fast,” Erin Chilimigras said as quoted by WLOX.

“When I did well at something, we kept moving up, so it wasn’t easy,” Jimmy said. “My parents did a good job keeping me challenged.”