How Many US Presidents Actually Studied Law?
A trickier question than you think
Of the 46 US presidents, 27 worked as lawyers, including current president Joe Biden, but not all of them have actually earned law degrees. Some of the presidents who worked as lawyers but never earned a law degree were:
- Abraham Lincoln;
- James Madison;
- James Monroe;
- John Adams;
- Thomas Jefferson.
Those who did earn law degrees included:
- Barack Obama (from the Harvard Law School);
- Bill Clinton (from the Yale Law School);
- Gerald Ford (from the Yale Law School);
- Richard Nixon (from the Duke University School of Law);
- Rutherford B. Hayes (from the Harvard Law School);
- William Howard Taft (from the University of Cincinnati Law School).
Also, long after Theodore Roosevelt and Franklin D. Roosevelt attended the Columbia Law School, they were posthumously awarded law degrees.
Presidency’s relative lack of qualification rules
Most sophisticated jobs require a degree in a relevant field. An accountant usually has at least a bachelor’s degree. However, accountants are not usually in charge of an entire population like presidents are, yet presidents in many countries are able to run for office without qualifications, sometimes ending up as tyrants who ruin other countries, including theirs.
The talent pool for presidency has become wide enough for celebrities like businessmen, actors, singers, and boxers to enter the scope. Donald Trump, a notorious businessman, became president, and actor and former wrestler Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson and singer Kanye West are hinting to future runs. In fact, West already ran for presidency, gaining only 60,000 out of 160,000,000 estimated votes, but he did not seem serious about his first run and has already posted a picture on social media with the caption, “KANYE 2024”.
A similar situation abroad
Ukraine has an interesting history as well. Former boxer Vitali Klitschko is the mayor of the capital, Kyiv, and Volodymyr Zelensky, a comedic actor who once played a president, is now president of the country. Admittedly, actors, boxers, and so on have had to learn some sort of leadership during their careers, so those skills could translate over to presidency, especially when there is a team of experts under them.
In the end, the results are what matter the most. It does not matter if a good president studied law, politics, or business. In fact, there does not seem to be a clear correlation between education, work experience, and presidency. It could be a hint that other fields should start accepting applicants based on what they can do instead of what they have done.
If there remains a concern that US presidents should have the minimum educational requirements to run for office, all presidents since 1953 have actually had bachelor degrees or higher, and this development may lead to stricter enforcement of qualification rules in the future, although the celebration of pop culture icons as potential presidents seems to be on the rise as well. A businessman becoming a president may be seen as a reasonable transition compared to future presidents.
