WHEN 18-year-old Kathleen Holtz joins the Californian bar next month she will become the youngest lawyer in America, three years before she can legally buy herself a drink.

At the age of eight, when her school friends were dreaming about princesses and ponies, she was already casting around for a suitable law college.

The slim blonde teenager from Whittier, an unglamorous suburb of Los Angeles, said she was frustrated at the academic pace of school and was relieved to enrol at her first college when she was 11.

“I was bored at school. I don’t feel like I missed out on anything by not going to high school,” she said last week.

By summer she had graduated both from college and the law school at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA).

At law school her peers, who were up to 10 years older than her, treated her well until they discovered she was 15, and then many turned on her, calling her “freak” or “Ally McBeal Jr”.

UCLA law professor Eugene Volokh, who himself graduated from college at 15 but spent several years working as a computer programmer before going to law school, believed Holtz was intellectually prepared for student life.

“If you didn’t know Kathleen’s age you wouldn’t even think about it. It’s easier for girls to look older than their age than it is for boys,” he said.

Now she has found her first job, at the Los Angeles law firm of TroyGould, which represents Hollywood studios, but she has to remain under supervision until the local bar association ushers her into their ranks next month. Holtz could be earning $1m a year within five years.

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