Josie Pearce ’26 J.D. M.D. ’29, always knew that she wanted to be a lawyer. What she didn’t expect was to become a doctor too. Now she is the first female J.D./M.D. candidate at Stanford, according to her law school advisor Elizabeth Di Giovanni, who cited records from the registrar’s office.
As one of just a handful of J.D./M.D. candidates in Stanford’s history, she’s now carving a unique path at the intersection of law, policy and medicine.
“I was one of those kids where people said, ‘You would make a good lawyer.’ I don’t know if that’s really a compliment but nonetheless, a lot of my law school friends were told that at a very young age,” she said.
Pearce graduated from Dartmouth College in 2020 with a degree in government. After graduation, she began working as a legal assistant in Boston. However, her passion for medicine soon led her to enroll in Harvard’s post-baccalaureate Premedical Program while working full-time.
“I remembered back to high school, liking science, despite taking zero science classes at Dartmouth as a government major. I thought, if I did this, I would combine my passion for law, public health and health policy. That was where the dream was born,” she said.
Pearce’s interest in medical school stems from her personal experience with lupus, a chronic autoimmune disease. She has been an advocate for the disease since she was a teenager, highlighting her experiences through competition in pageants.
“I’ve had lupus since I was 15, and around 2021, I completely changed my diet and lifestyle. I went plant based and started focusing on sleep and exercise. So I went from someone who was on medication and told, ‘You’re going to be on this medication for the rest of your life,’ to getting off medication,” she said.
Juggling law and medicine degrees is no small feat, but Pearce says that she has become used to the balancing act.
“It was a ton of work to be working full-time at a law firm and doing a post-bacc. I would finish a whole day of work and then be like, ‘Oh no, I have to go take my chemistry exam.’ It wasn’t super normal, but I just loved it,” she said.
For Pearce, a southern California native, Stanford was an obvious fit.
“Stanford produces innovators. They admit people who are so excited to do things that have never been done before and then give them every resource imaginable to go after their goals. I wanted to come to a place where I was excited to do both degrees and the institution was excited about it,” she said.
Pearce is now in her first year of medical school, and is using her credits to count toward her final year of law school. She is president-emeritus of the Veterans Legal Assistance Program at Stanford Law School and is on the Stanford Law Review.
“Like a grandma, I’ve been going to bed at 8:30 p.m. recently. Ultimately, I’ve been trying to stay healthy and just focus on getting enough sleep every single night,” she said.
Through her journey, Pearce aims to start conversations about the connection between diet, lifestyle and health. Though she is unsure what career she wants to pursue after graduation, Pearce hopes to work in health policy, with a specific focus on food and nutrition.
“How are people eating? How are people best able to spend SNAP dollars? These are things I want to influence so that Americans are no longer dying from diseases that are completely preventable with lifestyle changes,” she said.
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