Youngest Judge in the History in Greenville, S.C.

Last year Jasmine Twitty was appointed to the Easley municipal bench in upstate South Carolina.
What's remarkable about that is that Judge Twitty is only 26 years old.

In a short "as told to" essay posted on actress Amy Poehler's "Smart Girls" website, Judge Twitty describes her unusual career trajectory.

After graduating from the College of Charleston as a political science major, the Greenville, S.C.-native was hired as a night clerk at the local county bond court. She says she spent a year and a half coordinating hearings, dealing with paperwork and working long hours.

"I realized I had the job experience to make the leap to judgeship. No one had set out for a judgeship at 24 before, but I ran my goals by my family," she writes. "They encouraged me to go for it. I wasn’t required to attend law school because in South Carolina, summary court judges don’t need a law degree—they’re appointed. I started talking to people."

She completed a training program and passed a certification examination. She was 25 when she was sworn in, and it "felt surreal," she says, but she's since grown accustomed to the demands of the part-time job. She says she oversees initial proceedings in criminal cases. "I had to learn that early on, working in night court, seeing what things people are capable of," she writes. "The hardest part is the effort it takes not to bring it home,"

Judge Twitty is the youngest judge in Easley's history, according to WSPA-TV, but not in American history. According to an Orlando Sentinel report from 1995, a man named David Elmer Ward was elected a county judge in Lee County, Fla., in 1932 at the age of 22.