The University of Michigan Law School, ranked No. 8 in the country, caused a bit of a stir in the law school admissions world this week with their newest accepted student.
Meet Emily, aka hotblockchain, a Playboy Bunny with millions of followers—and potentially your future lawyer.
Emily has an expansive social media presence—2.4 million on TikTok, 1 million and change on Instagram. She’s a self-professed influencer, but more properly, she’s an erotic model and a college student at Carnegie Mellon. She posts videos and photos of her body online, and people, mostly men, follow her to view them.
She’s also a Playboy Bunny, in the newest incarnation of the Playboy brand. Playboy has a new online site, The Playboy Club—an OnlyFans rival, but more curated, and more tame. Models have to apply to be accepted, and the content they post isn’t as sexually graphic as you might find on OnlyFans.
In Emily’s case, her Playboy content is just a bit spicier than her Instagram photos. There are nude photos behind a paywall, but that’s as lewd as it gets. For an online erotic model in the modern age, it’s practically virginal.
Millions of followers—think about that for a second. Regardless of morality, that is an extraordinarily impressive feat only few have accomplished.
U-M Law itself only has 20,000 followers on TikTok and they’re cranking out content. Much of it features the admissions dean herself, “Dean Z” as Dean Sarah Zearfoss is known. Law school applicants refer to Dean Z by name on Reddit and see her as a sort of admissions guru, from all her videos describing the law school admissions process.
Dean Z espouses a sort of holistic view to admissions. She claims to be interested less in specific scores and more in the whole person, who they are, what they’ve done, what they’d like to do. She admits it’s subjective, and personal—she admits who she wants to admit and sees it as her duty to “keep out the monsters” from their program.
Her candor is appreciable, but criticism is fair as well. Clearly the dean’s own personal judgment, beliefs, and ideology affect her admissions decisions. Particularly in regards to moral character, which is a major factor in law school admissions. In this case, Dean Z saw no issue whatsoever with Emily’s erotic internet content.
On the contrary, according to a TikTok from Emily, Dean Z was so impressed with her application that she personally sent her a note along with her acceptance letter. That really riled up the law school admissions forums—not only was Emily accepted to a top school, but their guru praised her application.
Maybe the dean has high hopes for pairing off Emily. She’s posted that U-M Law functions as a sort of breeding ground, a marriage market, along with being a law school.
I doubt the dean did extensive research into Emily’s content. If it was a male dean, you bet this would be a different conversation. It’d be like that scene from Legally Blonde, where Elle Woods stuns the old white men at Harvard Law with her blonde bikini video essay.
Perhaps the dean did do some research and didn’t find Emily’s content objectionable. Current attitudes in academia accept and praise “sex workers.” You hear it often, that “sex workers” shouldn’t be stigmatized, that their work is valid and they should be protected.
Does Emily qualify as a sex worker? Or is she simply a model, a creator, an influencer, who monetizes the erotic? She doesn’t have sex on camera. But she does make money selling sexual desire.
Surely, some find her content morally objectionable, akin to a sort of digital prostitution. Selling nude photos is selling nude photos. Some view it as immoral, some as merely tolerable, some as something to be encouraged.
In any case, it won’t keep you out of U-M Law School in 2025. Perhaps there’s another reason for that. Remember these are lawyers, after all, used to operating in Machiavellian ways.
It’s not hard to see why a Law School Dean who aspires to TikTok stardom herself would be impressed by Emily’s following. For U-M Law, clearly trying to position itself as a major digital presence, the attendance of a young woman with millions of followers would be a major coup.
Just think of the potential. Emily breasting boobily through the idyllic Law Quad, with millions of views on TikTok. U-M Law’s social media team must be salivating right now. Along with their incoming class of male 1Ls.
In the attention-based economy, Emily’s millions of followers are worth their weight in gold. She’s not just suitable for admission to law school, she’s bigger than the law school.
Honestly, she should be asking herself whether to even bother with them at all, rather than the other way around. But her dream, apparently, is to be a lawyer.
The controversy arose when other applicants felt like their own dreams had been tarnished. Law school admissions are high stakes, and applicants are a serious bunch. They tend to be high achievers, with impressive GPAs, extracurriculars, top LSAT scores, all of it.
Eager to gain any advantage, they browse forums like Reddit’s r/lawschooladmissions, sharing tips and details of their admissions processes and decisions.
In a since deleted post, dozens of future lawyers were aghast at U-M Law’s decision to admit a literal Playboy Bunny.
The other applicants saw her online presence as a major moral affront to their own efforts they’ve made to make themselves clean and presentable.
What they don’t understand is that, in the current climate, Emily’s online presence is an asset. These vaunted institutions have succumbed to the whims of the attention-based economy.
Somewhere out there is a nerd with a high GPA reading his rejection letter from U-M Law and cursing Emily for taking his spot. Others, the so-called Monsters—with blemishes on their record still unacceptable to academia—wonder why erotic modeling is fine, even celebrated, but their record is seen as irredeemable.
Their concerns are, perhaps, legitimate, but it’s not my purpose here to condemn or condone Emily’s internet activity. Whether you agree with the dean who admitted her, or her enraged fellow applicants, is up to you and the values you live by.
Bobby Mars is art director of Michigan Enjoyer. Follow him on X @bobby_on_mars.
