Jimmy Chilimigras, an 18-year-old from Bay St Louis, Mississippi, graduated from Loyola University New Orleans College of Law on May 10 with the highest honors, ranking in the top 2% of his class. He earned the highest grade in 40% of his courses.
In an interview with the Guardian, Chilimigras said he wants to focus his legal career on two areas: tax law reform and litigation against social media companies over claims that their products are designed to be addictive to youth.
“What they’re creating is extremely predatory and harmful, and yet they’re sending it out knowing that it’s … harmful and not really taking any action to reduce the harm or address it,” Chilimigras said.
“You have a duty to protect people from harm, and if [you] breach that duty, and that breach causes these people damages … you should be held liable.”
Chilimigras said his interest in holding social media platforms accountable grew out of observing how much time his siblings and friends spend on sites and apps. He said friends have described being “completely absorbed” by social media.
“They spend more time on it than they like, and they’ll tell me, ‘What this does to me — I don’t like it, but I can’t do anything about it,’” Chilimigras said. “It’s sad, so it kind of sticks with you a little.”
Chilimigras’s educational trajectory began in early childhood. He could speak in full sentences at age two, according to his family. He was home-schooled through high school, working through textbook-based courses and testing at his own pace with his parents’ supervision, and earned a high school diploma at age 12.
By 15, he had completed a bachelor’s and a master’s degree in accounting through online coursework. He then passed the four-part certified public accountant exam, each part about four-and-a-half hours long, spending about one to two months studying per section. He holds the recognition as the world’s youngest CPA.
He scored 174 out of 180 on the law school admission test before his 16th birthday and enrolled at Loyola University New Orleans, about 60 miles from his family home in Bay St Louis.
During law school, Chilimigras commuted from the family home he shared with his father, a real estate manager; his mother, a broker; and his six younger siblings. He said the age gap was evident at school functions where classmates ordered alcoholic beverages — he asked for milk at first and later switched to cranberry juice after bartenders said they had no milk.
Chilimigras recalled one moment in class when a professor lecturing about reasonable suspicion for police to detain a motorist, using the smell of marijuana as an example, said “everyone knows what the smell of marijuana is” before glancing at Chilimigras and adding, “Well — maybe not you,” to laughter.
Loyola has touted Chilimigras as the youngest law school graduate in Louisiana’s history. A list compiled by the history and culture website oldest.org suggests he could be among the four youngest people worldwide to have obtained a law degree.
On the night of his commencement, Chilimigras attended a friend’s high school graduation — the first traditional high school ceremony he had ever attended.
“I guess it kind of hit me [there] a … bit,” Chilimigras said.
After a family Caribbean cruise to celebrate, Chilimigras began studying for the bar exam. He also plans to pursue a master of laws degree in taxation at Northwestern University’s Pritzker School of Law in Chicago.
Among his tax-law interests, Chilimigras said he wants to work on whether jury trials should decide tax controversies — currently they do not — and whether exceptions should exist to the 90-day deadline for contesting an IRS audit letter. He noted the deadline currently has no exceptions, even if “your lawyer was a fraudster and never filed your [tax] filing, or maybe your house burned down, or there was a hurricane, or the IRS letter never actually reached you.”
Chilimigras said he sees those issues as “a great area to do some good.”