Juris Doctor
A Juris Doctor, Doctor of Jurisprudence, or Doctor of Law is a graduate-entry professional degree that primarily prepares individuals to practice law. In the United States and the Philippines, it is the only qualifying law degree. Other jurisdictions, such as Australia, Canada, and Hong Kong, offer both the postgraduate JD degree as well as the undergraduate Bachelor of Laws, Bachelor of Civil Law, or other qualifying law degree.
First offered by the University of Chicago Law School in the United States in 1902, the degree generally requires three years of full-time study to complete and is conferred upon students who have successfully completed coursework and practical training in legal studies. The JD curriculum typically includes fundamental legal subjects such as constitutional law, civil procedure, criminal law, contracts, property, and torts, along with opportunities for specialization in areas like international law, corporate law, or public policy. Upon receiving a JD, graduates must pass a bar examination to be licensed to practice law. The American Bar Association does not allow an accredited JD degree to be issued in less than two years of law school studies.
In the United States, the JD has the academic standing of a professional doctorate, and is described as a "doctor's degree – professional practice" by the United States Department of Education's National Center for Education Statistics. In Australia, South Korea, and Hong Kong, it has the academic standing of a master's degree, while in Canada, it is considered a second-entry bachelor's degree.
To be fully authorized to practice law in the courts of a given state in the United States, the majority of individuals holding a JD degree must pass a bar examination, except from the state of Wisconsin. The United States Patent and Trademark Office also involves a specialized "Patent Bar" which requires applicants to hold a bachelor's degree or the equivalent in certain scientific or engineering fields alongside their Juris Doctor degree in order to practice in patent cases —prosecuting patent applications — before it. This additional requirement does not apply to the litigation of patent-related matters in state and federal courts.
Etymology and abbreviations
In the United States, the professional doctorate in law may be conferred in Latin or in English as Juris Doctor and at some law schools Doctor of Law, or Doctor of Jurisprudence. "Juris Doctor" literally means "teacher of law", while the Latin for "Doctor of Jurisprudence" – Jurisprudentiae Doctor – literally means "teacher of legal knowledge".The JD differs from the Doctor of the Science of Law, Doctor of Juridical Science, or Doctor of Laws. In the US, the JSD and SJD both require students to hold a JD and a Master of Laws ; the JSD is for those wanting to pursue an academic career in the US, while the SJD is typically for students who are pursuing careers as professors of law at universities in other countries. The JSD and SJD are equivalent to PhD degrees in law, while the LLD may be equivalent to the PhD or may be a higher doctorate.
Historical context
Origins of the law degree
The first university in Europe, the University of Bologna, was founded as a school of law by four famous legal scholars in the 11th century who were students of the glossator school in that city. This served as the model for other law schools of the Middle Ages, and other early universities such as the University of Padua. The first academic degrees may have been doctorates in civil law followed by canon law. These were not professional degrees but rather indicated that their holders had been approved to teach at the universities. While Bologna granted only doctorates, preparatory degrees were introduced in Paris and then in the English universities.History of legal training in England
During the medieval period, the teaching of law at Cambridge and Oxford Universities was mainly for philosophical or scholarly purposes and not meant to prepare one to practice law. The universities only taught civil and canon law but not the common law that applied in most jurisdictions. Professional training for practicing common law in England was undertaken at the Inns of Court, but over time the training functions of the Inns lessened considerably, and apprenticeships with individual practitioners arose as the prominent medium of preparation. However, because of the lack of standardization of study, and of objective standards for appraisal of these apprenticeships, the role of universities became subsequently important for the education of lawyers in the English-speaking world.In England in 1292, when Edward I first requested that lawyers be trained, students merely sat in the courts and observed, but over time the students would hire professionals to lecture them in their residences, which led to the institution of the Inns of Court system. The original method of education at the Inns of Court was a mix of moot court-like practice and lecture, as well as court proceedings observation. By the fifteenth century, the Inns functioned like a university, akin to the University of Oxford and the University of Cambridge, though very specialized in purpose. With the frequent absence of parties to suits during the Crusades, the importance of the lawyer role grew tremendously, and the demand for lawyers grew.
Historically, Oxford and Cambridge did not see common law as worthy of academic study, and included coursework in law only in the context of canon and civil law and for the purpose of the study of philosophy or history only. As a consequence of the need for practical education in law, the apprenticeship program for solicitors emerged, structured and governed by the same rules as the apprenticeship programs for the trades. The training of solicitors by a five-year apprenticeship was formally established by the Attorneys and Solicitors Act 1728. William Blackstone became the first lecturer in English common law at the University of Oxford in 1753, but the university did not establish the program for the purpose of professional study, and the lectures were philosophical and theoretical in nature. Blackstone insisted that the study of law should be university-based, where concentration on foundational principles can be had, instead of concentration on detail and procedure provided by apprenticeship and the Inns of Court.
The 1728 act was amended in 1821 to reduce the period of the required apprenticeship to three years for graduates from Oxford, Cambridge, and Dublin, as "the admission of such graduates should be facilitated, in consideration of the learning and abilities requisite for taking such degree". This was extended in 1837 to cover the newly established universities of Durham and London, and again in 1851 to include the new Queen's University of Ireland.
The Inns of Court continued but became less effective, and admission to the bar still did not require any significant educational activity or examination. In 1846, Parliament examined the education and training of prospective barristers and found the system to be inferior to that of Europe and the United States, as Britain did not regulate the admission of barristers. Therefore, formal schools of law were called for but were not finally established until later in the century, and even then the bar did not consider a university degree in admission decisions.
Until the mid nineteenth century, most law degrees in England were postgraduate degrees. The Cambridge degree was an exception: it took six years from matriculation to complete, but only three of these had to be in residence, and the BA was not required. These degrees specialized in Roman civil law rather than in English common law, the latter being the domain of the Inns of Court, and thus they were more theoretical than practical. Cambridge re-established its LLB degree in 1858 as an undergraduate course alongside the BA, and the London LLB, which had previously required a minimum of one year after the BA, become an undergraduate degree in 1866. The older nomenclature continues to be used for the BCL at Oxford today, which is a master's level program, while Cambridge moved its LLB back to being a postgraduate degree in 1922 but only renamed it as the LLM in 1982.
Between the 1960s and the 1990s, law schools in England took on a more central role in the preparation of lawyers and consequently improved their coverage of advanced legal topics to become more professionally relevant. Over the same period, American law schools became more scholarly and less professionally oriented, so that in 1996 Langbein could write: "That contrast between English law schools as temples of scholarship and American law schools as training centers for the profession no longer bears the remotest relation to reality".
Legal training in colonial North America and 19th-century United States
Initially there was much resistance to lawyers in colonial North America because of their role in hierarchical England, but slowly the colonial governments started using the services of professionals trained in the Inns of Court in London, and by the end of the American Revolution there was a functional bar in each state. Due to an initial distrust of a profession open only to the elite in England, as institutions for training developed in what would become the United States they emerged as quite different from those in England.Initially in the United States the legal professionals were trained and imported from England. A formal apprenticeship or clerkship program was established first in New York in 1730 — at that time a seven-year clerkship was required, and in 1756 a four-year college degree was required in addition to five years of clerking and an examination. Later the requirements were reduced to two years of college education. But a system like the Inns did not develop, and a college education was not required in England until the 19th century, so this system was unique.
The clerkship program required much individual study and the mentoring lawyer was expected to carefully select materials for study and guide the clerk in his study of the law and ensure that it was being absorbed. The student was supposed to compile notes of his reading of the law into a "commonplace book", which he would try to memorize. Although those were the ideals, in reality clerks were often overworked and rarely able to study the law individually as expected. They were often employed to tedious tasks, such as making handwritten copies of documents. Finding sufficient legal texts was also a seriously debilitating issue, and there was no standardization in the books assigned to the clerk trainees because they were assigned by their mentor, whose opinion of the law may have differed greatly from his peers.
It was said by one famous attorney in the United States, William Livingston, in 1745 in a New York newspaper that the clerkship program was severely flawed, and that most mentors
There were some few mentors that were dedicated to the service, and because of their rarity, they became so sought-after that the first law schools evolved from the offices of some of these attorneys, who took on many clerks and began to spend more time training than practicing law.
File:Tapping Reeve.jpg|right|thumb|Tapping Reeve, founder of the first law school in North America, the Litchfield Law School, in 1773
In time, the apprenticeship program was not considered sufficient to produce lawyers fully capable of serving their clients' needs. The apprenticeship programs often employed the trainee with menial tasks, and while they were well trained in the day-to-day operations of a law office, they were generally unprepared practitioners or legal reasoners. The establishment of formal faculties of law in United States universities did not occur until the latter part of the 18th century. With the beginning of the American Revolution, the supply of lawyers from Britain ended. The first law degree granted by a United States university was a Bachelor of Law in 1793 by the College of William and Mary, which was abbreviated LB; Harvard was the first university to use the LLB abbreviation in the United States.
The first university law programs in the United States, such as that of the University of Maryland established in 1812, included much theoretical and philosophical study, including works such as the Bible, Cicero, Seneca, Aristotle, Adam Smith, Montesquieu and Grotius. It has been said that the early university law schools of the early 19th century seemed to be preparing students for careers as statesmen rather than as lawyers. At the LLB programs in the early 1900s at Stanford University and Yale continued to include "cultural study", which included courses in languages, mathematics and economics. An LLB, or a Bachelor of Laws, recognized that a prior bachelor's degree was not required to earn an LLB.
In the 1850s there were many proprietary schools which originated from a practitioner taking on multiple apprentices and establishing a school and which provided a practical legal education, as opposed to the one offered in the universities which offered an education in the theory, history and philosophy of law. The universities assumed that the acquisition of skills would happen in practice, while the proprietary schools concentrated on the practical skills during education.