Is a J.D. a doctorate?

From what I've heard, the history went something like this:

1. For most of US history, the first degree in law was the Bachelor of Laws degree, or LL.B. Initially, you could enroll in an LLB program immediately after graduating from high school, as with any other bachelor's program. If you continued to study after earning the Bachelor of Laws, you could earn a Master of Laws, or LL.M., but this was optional.

2. Eventually some people applied to law schools as college graduates, rather than as high school graduates. In other words, these people had earned BA or BS degrees in college, but then decided to go back to college for the LLB. The law schools liked teaching college graduates, as opposed to high school graduates: the college grads were older, more mature, and better educated.

3. So law schools began to promote the BA/BS degree as a prerequisite for admission. Now this is the norm, although the ABA has never formally instituted as a requirement, so exceptions still exist.

4. But the lawyers became unhappy with this system. They were being required to study 4 years for an undergraduate degree (the BA/BS), and then study 3 more years for ... a second undergraduate degree (the LLB). Didn't they deserve a graduate degree after 7 years of study ?

5. So law schools decided the change the name of the LLB. The most sensible option might have been to rename it as a master's degree, but the LLM was already established as a post-LLB degree. So instead the "Bachelor of Laws" was renamed as the "Juris Doctor", which was a sufficiently inflated title to please everybody.

6. Hoowever, the LLM remains higher than the JD, just as the LLM was higher than the LLB. In other academic fields, you get a bachelor's, then a master's, then a doctorate. But in law, you get a bachelor's (BA/BS), then a doctorate (JD), then a master's (LLM). It doesn't necessarily make sense to non-lawyers.

 

My local school's Doctor of Pharmacy program includes two years of pre-professional curriculum and four years of the pharmacy curriculum. The students do not receive a bachelors degree enroute to the Pharm.D., and the only 600-level courses are the clinical rotations that comprise the final year.

 

Good question. Check these out:

University of Maryland

The Chronicle of Higher Education

Assistant Dean of Career Services
New York Law School

The Chronicle of Higher Education

In these situations the JD alone is not good enough.

 

This is a good synopsis of what happened in the filed of law. It also demonstrates the confusing position of first professional degrees in the higher education landscape. The first professional degree (MD, JD, PharmD, DDS, DMD, DO, OD, DPM, DVM, MDiv, DPT, etc.) is designed to be the entry qualification into a profession. It is the true "professional" degree. It is most often entered into after achieving the bachelors; however, as has been pointed out, many schools do not require the completion of the bachelors as a prerequisite. These degrees tend to require 3-4 years of full-time study. They do not require research dissertations, since they are not research doctorates.

Unlike research doctorates, which typically require prior completion of a masters degree, the persona with a first professional degree will seek a masters only to specialize in a certain area (such as an LL.M. in tax law). The masters is completed after the first professional degree.

 

I am not certain about the Psy.D., but the others are research doctorates, so you must have a bachelors (and in most cases, a masters) as a prerequisite. Although the first professional degrees (excepting the M.Div.) have the title "doctor," they are different degrees (with different goals) than the research doctorates.

I think that your opinion reflects the fact about what happened, at least according to what my colleagues in the legal profession have told me.

The J.D. is a first professional degree, the LL.M. is a masters degree and the S.J.D. is a research doctoral degree. Because the S.J.D. is a relatively uncommon degree, most colleges and universities treat faculty members with a first professional degree as having the equivalent of a research doctorate. Of course, each college of university establishes its own criteria for faculty qualifications. Carlosb gives us a good example of that.

 

By the way, the D.B.A., Ed.D., Th.D., D.P.A., S.J.D., Sc.D., etc. are not first professional degrees, they are classified as research doctorates. This adds another layer of confusion, as some programs have changed the dissertation requirements of their D.B.A. and Ed.D. programs, so as to try to differentiate them from their Ph.D. programs while, at most universities, their remains little, if any difference between these "professional doctorates" and the Ph.D. Ironically, the whole "research" dissertation versus "applied" dissertation has never been the subject of any research study that I have been able to find.

 

The LLB in the UK is a first degree, but the old American LLB was a second bachelor's.

 

Depends on what you mean by "old".

In the 19th Century, you could get an American LLB as a first degree -- just like any other bachelor's degree. For example, Louis Brandeis entered Harvard Law School in 1875 as an 18-year-old, and held no college degree other than the LLB.

In the 20th Century, American law schools started favoring applicants with BA/BS degrees, and this became the norm. So then the American LLB typically became a "second bachelor's". But the American LLB was originally a first degree.

 

Entering law school without a bachelor's degree is actually more common than you might think. The law school community doesn't like to admit it, but in practice there is a loophole that many of them use.

Try Googling the phrase "law school 3+3". Many law schools, including some well known names, will admit applicants under a "3+3" program, as they are finishing their third year (not fourth) of undergraduate study. So they spend 3 years as undergraduates and 3 years in law school. The first year of law school gets counted twice: the credits from that year count towards both the JD and the BA/BS.

So the student gets the BA/BS after the first year in law school, and then the JD two years later. But in reality, a 3+3 student only does three years of undergraduate study.

 

Interesting historical trivia. Thanks.

 

I have no horse in this race (as a holder of both a PhD and a JD, I can get called "doctor" either way, although my dissertation defense was probably the last time anyone did). I think there has been major degree inflation, but the JD isn't the poster child. Very few JDs call themselves "doctor" and those that do are laughed at by the rest of us. There's even been some legal question among state bars about whether it's deceptive. Also those who do take academic positions tend to be well qualified and usually have multiple publications to their name, evidencing research skills at least as strong as a run-of-the-mill doctorate.

I think the PharmD is much more troubling. While very few JDs come through without a prior bachelors degree (we had none in my class, and ~2-3% had PhDs), my understanding is that almost all PharmD students enter after the second year of undergraduate. Additionally, these PharmDs are operating in health care, an area where unsophisticated customers are conditioned to believe that everything a "doctor" says is right. While the use of "doctor" in health care has drifted fall from its Latin root of "teacher", I think the usage as a healer is much too established to change.

Until recently pharmacists just got a bachelor's degree. I really don't see what they hoped to accomplish by re-naming the degree. Did they believe that physicians were suddenly going to consider them colleagues? Nurses consider them superior?

 

Many of my faculty colleagues at the public and private universities where i have worked possessed the JD as the highest degree. Interestingly, law professors never used the title "doctor," while those teaching in other disciplines, did.

My university has a College of Pharmacy and most of our Pharm.D. students enter our program having completed their bachelors. For the rest, they complete their bachelors through us. Of course, we are able to pick and choose, since we have about three or four times as many applicants as we have slots.

 

The PharmD is far from just "renaming" the degree. Pharmacy became a PharmD because of the changes in the field. The curriculum is very different from what a bachelors in pharmacy was, and to address the difference, many universities now offer the "Working PharmD" programs for those who graduated under the old system to update their skills. And yes, many MDs do consider them colleagues, especially hospital pharmacists. An MD has one or two semesters of pharmacology training, a PharmD has 4 years. It is not uncommon anymore for MDs to do the diagnosis, but look to the PharmD to help prescribe treatment, particularly in areas like oncology. In many hospitals now, pharmacists go on rounds with the MDs. The pharmacist role is now more of a clinician, than just someone putting pills in little bottles.

There have been some states that have started early admissions programs for those with associates degree (known as a '2-4' program) that have the right prereqs to go straight into a PharmD program. There are even '0-6' programs, for people straight out of high school. This was started mainly to help address the shortage of qualified PharmDs. A few places that have tried this are starting to scale back on these programs, I think mainly because the graduation rates were not so great. To be a competitive candidate, most pharmacy schools still want students with bachelors degrees.

 

One of the most interesting responses I've heard (from J.D. holders of course) is that the first doctorates at the University of Bologna were in law, and thus lawyers have a greater claim on the title than academics and physicians.

 

Except the degree didn't lead to practicing law.

In most fields, there is an academic (scholarly) side and a practice side. This is an example of the former. Academics studying the law for scholarship purposes, not to become lawyers.

No, the lawyers don't have the claim. The academics do, even if it was law they studied.

 

And, if we wish to get technical, the clergy have the first claims to academic degrees and licenses.

 

Indeed.

So the "queen of the doctorates" is the S.J.D. then :wink:

 

Indeed! So I guess the S.J.D. is the queen of the doctorates. :smile:

 

You could make that argument. I've found the S.J.D to be very, very rare.

IT

 

Could you enlighten us on the history of theological degrees and licenses?