Is JD a doctorate level?

Just wondering a JD has just 4 years of education and rescembles a bachelor's degree in duration. Is it really a doctorate level? Cuz I dont know the American system of education very well. Even if it is a doctoral program can a JD be addressed as Dr. John Doe etc...

 

Hi vinodgopal,

J.D. is actually three years of full-time study. It used to be called LL.B. in the 60s. The name was changed because law graduates were complaining about the title they received after seven years of college work. This should give you some indication as to the level of the degree.

 

In the US, a JD typically takes 3 years. It is a graduate degree, so it typically requires a 4-year bachelor's degree as a prerequisite. So the JD usually represents 7 years of study total.

As I understand it, the law degree in the US was originally an undergraduate bachelor's degree, known as the LL.B. There was also a more advanced master's-level degree, known as the LL.M.

The LL.B. eventually evolved into a graduate degree; students were expected to complete 4 years of undergraduate study before beginning the study of law. So lawyers were typically awarded two bachelor's degrees: first a regular B.A. or B.S., then the LL.B. With further study, you could earn the LL.M.

The law community wanted to change the name of the LL.B. degree to reflect the fact that it had become a graduate degree. Somehow they settled on J.D.

Unfortunately, this is confusing. In other fields, the "doctoral" degree signifies the highest level of study, but in law, it does not: the LL.M. degree still outranks the J.D./LL.B. So law is the only field where a "master's" degree outranks the "doctoral" degree.

Possibly for this reason, it is not customary to address attorneys by the title of "Doctor" in the US.

 

The JD is a first professional degree. It is in the same "class" as the MD, DDS, DVM, etc.

Generally speaking, in academic circles, the PhD and the MA/MSc and related degrees are considered differently than the first professional degrees. In many cases, the academic degree is considered higher.

Some people consider the MBA, MFA, MPH, etc. to be first professional - this is a matter of debate and the are probably more properly called "terminal degrees" than "first professional".

Some people don't consider those degrees any differently than an academic graduate degree...

 

Originally a law degree could be earned without having to attend undergraduate study. As a result, the first law degree earned was referred to as an LLB or Bachelors of Law, the second the LLM or Master of Law and finally the LLD or Doctor of Law. As the legal profession evolved, the academic requirements to earn an LLB became much more rigorous. As a result, law schools started to require students to possess a Bachelors degree before entering law school, thereby bringing about the eventual change from of the LLB to the JD or Juris Doctor. Today the professional law degrees are the JD, LLM and the SJD or Doctor of Judicial Science. The title of doctor is generally not used by holders of law degrees in the US. However, this is not true in the rest of the world. Quite to the contrary, in other countries holders of law degrees often are addressed by their formal title of doctor. However, the title of Doctor in the US and abroad is used quite often in all academic settings except, US law schools.

 

According to the ABA.....

Source: http://www.abanet.org/legaled/standards/councilstatements.html

 

At one time, it was actually considered unethical for JDs to use the title of "Doctor". This reflects the fact that the JD gradually replaced the older (but otherwise equivalent) LLB as the first professional degree. So for many years, the legal field simultaneously included both older attorneys with LLBs and younger attorneys with JDs. It was considered misleading for young JDs to claim the title of "Doctor" when older, more experienced attorneys with equivalent LLBs (or even superior LLMs) could not.

 

Just one more point... The JD is usually considered to be a doctorate on the academic pay scale.

Dave

 

Re: According to the ABA.....

This is wishful thinking and inaccurate. Many Ph.D. programs require a masters degree before the required coursework and dissertation, so the number of units accumulated in coursework could be similar. However, there can be many semesters of dissertation units that are racked up for a total of 4, 5, or more years. Digesting legal opinions and writing legal briefs over the course of three years is not equivalent to producing original research that advances knowledge in the discipline. In general, the J.D. (with or without passing the bar) is not comparable to the Ph.D.

Dave

 

Re: Re: According to the ABA.....

Good point, Dave.

Roscoe

 

Re: Re: According to the ABA.....

While I respect your view as to the Ph.D. not being the equivalent to a JD, I have to respectfully disagree. From the first day a student enters law school they are required to engage in extensive research and writing, which continues throughout their entire 3 year course of study. In addition, students are administered only one exam after completing a law school course, which means every law school exam, is a comprehensive exam – which is ultimately tested when taking the bar exam which in many states extends over a 3 day period. When you take into account mandated trial advocacy, appellate advocacy and clinical courses, the ability to orally defend ones legal analysis and research position becomes apparent, similar to a Ph.D’s oral defense of there dissertation. Moreover, your statement that “Digesting legal opinions and writing legal briefs over the course of three years is not equivalent to producing original research that advances knowledge in the discipline” demonstrates an extremely narrow understanding of law school. Before a law student is permitted to graduate they must write at least 2 research articles of publishable quality and in many cases these articles are in fact published in law reviews and journal across the world. In fact, law review articles are the primary means for the legal community to advancing original knowledge and analysis within the profession. Whether you realize it or not these articles are “original research that advances knowledge in the discipline” although, in a different context than a Ph.D. dissertation.

As I am sure you will admit, not all Ph.D. programs are created equal and not all Ph.D. research advances knowledge in the discipline or takes years to complete. Case and point – there exists several on-line Ph.D. programs that can be completed in as little as 3 years from accredited universities. However, there is not one ABA approved law school where a JD can be earned on-line or in less than 3 years of full time study.

I want to be clear; I am making no disparaging judgment regarding these on-line Ph.D. programs or the rigors generally required to earn a Ph.D., but simply making the point that the blanket statement that a JD is “not comparable to the Ph.D.” is not accurate. While the courses of study are very different, the academic rigors to obtain each have very clear parallels.

 

Re: Re: Re: According to the ABA.....

Understood. We are just discussing here... These are my opinions after scrutinizing many of both types of programs.

For any J.D. to be like a Ph.D., even an online Ph.D., in addition to the normal high dropout rates, at least half of the students would be required to repeat the last year of law school over and over again until an original piece of research of 150 to 300 pages satisfies a group of three experts on the subject. Imagine if law school required 3 to 6 years or more of effort, debt, and putting your life/work on hold. Imagine if every law school student were completely on their own to finish the last year and could really share their work with nobody for fear they would turn it in as their own. Also, there are no instructors to tell you what the test is going to be on. The J.D. is more like two to three masters degrees crammed together in a fixed period of time (three years), with none of the parallels above.

Instead, the Ph.D. usually requires a masters degree for entry and at least a masters degree or more of course work before one enters the variable length dissertation proposal and dissertation writing stage. At any stage, there is no guarantee how long it will take or if you can even finish. If you quit, you leave with nothing because you can't easily transfer to another program as is possible with a standardized law curriculum. Moreover, there is nobody at the same stage to turn to for help; you are all alone with your committee. The Ph.D. is variable length with the minimum completion time being roughly three years that one might spend in law school.

That said, the ABA text is naive and incorrect in its comparision of the J.D. to the Ph.D.; they are completely different animals, in my opinion. They are two different processes: one is fixed length to produce practitioners over a body of knowledge and the other is variable length to produce scholars capable of empirically extending the body of knowledge. What's more there is no big payoff at the end because college teachers are not paid as well as those in the legal profession.

Dave

 

Re: Re: Re: According to the ABA.....

It's possible to earn an accredited JD degree online. Look at DETC-accredited Concord Law School.

It's true that a JD degree of this kind may not have as much prestige or utility in the legal community as a "real" JD from a B&M ABA-accredited program. But it's equally true that an online PhD from the University of Phoenix may not have as much prestige or utility in the academic community as a "real" PhD from a B&M research university.

 

Re: Re: Re: Re: According to the ABA.....

I agree that it is naive to compare the JD and Ph.D. as ultimately equivalent, as they are two different "animals". In addition both require different skills. I'm not convinced most JD'a are prepared to handle PhD study, but neither are PhD's ready to handle the rigors of law school study. So I say hats off to both on their contributions to the professional and academic communities.

-Calbog- Concord Law School may be DETC accredited, but that bears not relationship to ABA approved which sets the national standard for legal academic study. In contrast, many "accredited" on-line Ph.D. programs are accredited by the “same” accrediting bodies as traditional B&M schools. This is a significant distinction.

 

No need to use the past tense. They're getting old, but there are probably thousands of attorneys still running aroung with LLBs. I think the majority of the U.S. Supreme Court hold LLBs rather than JDs.

 

Re: Re: Re: Re: According to the ABA.....

The main presumption you make with which I'm having trouble is the credit hour requirement. For most people, the Master's coursework is included in the PhD. Students most often get the Master's along the way to the PhD, roughly at the midway point. So the ABA statement of 60+/- hours plus dissertation is probably accurate for most PhD holders. And for some PhD programs, the dissertation is 12 hours of the 60 hour requirement, so some PhD students actually take only 16 classes total for 48 credit hours. I took about 30 classes over three years to get a JD, almost twice as many as some PhD holders.

The traditional way to get a PhD is not to get a Master's of 30-40 credit hours, then start all over again and do 60 additional hours plus dissertation. Now I'm not saying there aren't people who do that when they change fields or schools, it's commonplace. But that's their own choice, it's not the prescribed route.

Merely using the number of years a program takes to complete is misleading as well. This is a function of the way the system is structured more than the amount of time it legitimately takes to obtain doctoral-level mastery of a subject. Simply put, law studies are more condensed than PhD studies. The average PhD student takes 9 hours a semester, the average law student 15. And no one can convince me of the relative rigor of the PhD program vis-a-vis law by claiming that 9 in the former is equivalent to 15 in the latter. PhD courses are probably less rigorous that law, at least in terms of what it takes to produce passing work. They are sometimes a complete joke, such that to receive a grade of less than "B" for a class, you must turn in every test blank and slap the professor full in the face every time you attend class. That might get you a "C", but more likely a "B-".

For example, I once took a doctoral-level Philosophy class from a professor who had a PhD from Harvard. The program was nationally-ranked. I didn't understand three words spoken the entire class. The papers I turned in were incoherent messes--or simply missed the point in every manner possible. The class was over my head, but not because it was so tough per se. It was just chock full of opaque nomenclature and specialized jargon. And I'd never taken a course in philosophy before other than dummy philosophy a dozen years earlier in undergrad. But without much effort or understanding, I received a "B".

The reason PhD students drift along in a relatively leisurely manner is because the system is primarily set up for professors to do their research. To be freed from the distasteful job of teaching (or even seeing) undergraduate students, departments hand out teaching assistantships to graduate students. They handle the messy toilet-cleaning-type jobs for the wizards who wear the long hoods on commencement. Most on ground graduate students probably would never attend if they didn't receive such an award (measly as the financial end of it is). So they spend a fair chunk of their time teaching freshmen and sophomores dummy math or english or psychology or business. This contributes in no meaningful way to their doctoral studies--in fact, it distracts from them.

That's why grad students move through programs at a glacial pace. It's not because it really takes four to seven years to do it; it's about the way the system is structured to accomodate the professors. And keeping graduate students there for an extra two or three years teaching undergraduates for $12,000/yr while doing essentially part time studies is beneficial to the professors. Why let a highly-educated workforce--who's willing to bear huge opportunity costs and get paid along the lines of the average Wal-Mart cashier--go in three or four years? Keep 'em around. Make 'em push the broom in your lab or teach the "morons" in undergrad. Just don't let 'em go.

Graduate programs are more about complex ritual, secret handshakes, glorified and grandiose hoop jumping--and, of course, providing professors with slave labor and classroom surrogates--than they are about educating PhD students in a logical and efficient manner.

I know of whence I speak.

 

Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: According to the ABA.....

First, you're not even close to accurate on the minimum or even average units required to complete the degree... Some doctoral programs require a masters degree for entry, some allow a masters degree to be earned along the way, some award the masters degree as a terminal degree to exit the program, and still others do not require a masters degree for entry nor do they award it. Dissertation units typically are repeated until the student gives up or completes the dissertation. The ABA is misinformed.

Second, the JD is designed to be a masters degree (actually a bachelors degree) as an MDiv is a masters degree, a ticket to enter advanced study in the discipline and/or achieve licensure. It is not the highest degree in legal education and it is not designed to produce legal scholars. The JD is a lot of work and produces practitioners capable of licensure, but it is fixed length and well-defined for students to follow. The JD is not a doctoral process of variable length and it does not produce "doctors" or "scholars" in the disclipine. Hence, it is not equivalent to the Ph.D. by any objective standard outside the legal discipline, in my humble opinion. In sum, JD holders should be paid as holders of masters degrees are paid. Again, the ABA has jumped to a self-serving conclusion.

In general, if the content of the curriculum and research is predetermined or well-defined, then it is not a doctoral process, which is variable in length and scope by definition.

Dave

 

Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: According to the ABA.....

Dave:

You're just flat wrong on the credit hour thing, at least in the U.S. Let that one go. There are quite a few doctoral programs that require only 60-72 total graduate credit hours exclusive of dissertation work, this is very common with a PhD. There are some that require less than 60 hours if you're not including dissertation "credits". This is a simple fact. Do I really need to go to every PhD program website to prove what I've seen from personal experience and the experience of numerous friends and colleagues? Most doctoral programs that require 60+/- credit hours for completion do not require a 30 to 40 credit hour masters for entry. As I said, this may be the case where a student has bounced around a bit since undergrad and changed programs or fields, but it is not the commonly-prescribed route.

Always remember when PhD programs advertise their "four to five years of full time study", they are really talking about 9 hours a semester, that's what they call full time, and they're really talking about classes in which at worst the vast majority of students will never get less than a "B", and sometimes in these classes you don't have to do any work whatsoever for that grade.

A great number of PhD students enter with only a bachelor's. They must then jump through some hoops to be formally admitted to the PhD program, but they are considered defacto doctoral-seeking students throughout. Most commonly, there is no bright line between the studies towards a master's and a PhD, other than orals or perhaps defense of a thesis. The coursework is the same, at least in the hard sciences. Even in other fields such as the social sciences, the only difference is a quant class or three, which may often be taken prior to completion of the master's anyway.

Just because the PhD programs in the U.S. are on the whole an indistinct mess compared with the study of law does not make the former more rigorous and deserving of a more dignified title. They are of indefinite length because they have evolved that way due to pressures from the academic community in the last century. As I said, they are so structured to benefit professors, not students.

If time to completion is the primary factor with regard to how degrees are to be compared, then let's set up an analagous scenerio. Imagine two systems. In system A, students would complete law school in three years full time, 90 credit hours. At the end of the three years of study, system A students would take a very rigorous test that almost was like taking excerpts of every test they'd taken over the course of the three years, at the same level of detail. Their work would be graded by a national and state board of examiners--peer review, if you will. If they did not pass, they would have to start studying immediately and could take the test again in 6 months. And so on until they passed, gave up or died. In system "B", students would take take law school in 5 or 6 years part time while teaching undergrads pre law and business courses. The coursework would last 3 or 4 years part time, they would take 20 or 25 classes rather than 30. The last year or two would be spent writing up original research--again, part time. Not all that much, only 50,000 - 100,000 words or so, and it really wouldn't have to be that sweeping or original. It would be reviewed by a few academics, some from different institutions. It could "advance the field" by producing a 200 page study of the likelihood of litigants in the Niarobi tribal court system of the 18th century prevailing given factors of social status and income. So which of these systems is more rigorous? Which deserves the more flashy title? That's a very fair question. And the answer may not be the one you prefer.

The JD is not "designed" to be a master's degree. Some people may consider it to be roughly that, but nowhere can anyone show me where that's the way it was designed. It wasn't really designed per se any more than any degree is designed. It evolved out of necessity, politics and accident, and the fittest elemts of it have survived. This is as it is with every institution in our society.

 

Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: According to the ABA.....

Hi. Changing the definitions of words and covering the other person with paper won't prop up this argument, as it might in litigation.

The JD is fixed length and well defined; it is not a doctoral process.

The accumulation of graduate-level credit does not a doctor make...

Dave

 

Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: According to the ABA.....

The fact that the University of Phoenix shares the exact same regional accreditation with the University of Chicago is not "significant" as far as the academic community is concerned. A PhD from the latter is still worth much, much more than a degree from the former.

I am willing to accept that a JD from a traditional ABA-approved school might be comparable, in terms of time and difficulty, to an online PhD from a non-traditional institution such as the University of Phoenix. However, it would be more realistic to compare apples to apples. Suppose two students enroll at the same B&M university (maybe Berkeley or Stanford) at the same time: one goes to the law school for the JD, the other goes to some Arts & Sciences Dept. for the PhD. The JD student will likely graduate after 3 years, but the PhD student will likely need 5-7 years, not counting postdocs.