Some Canadian law schools have switched to giving J.D. degrees. In US parlance, is it appropriate for someone who holds a J.D. to refer to it as a doctorate? To my mind, a doctorate is a Ph.D or an S.J.D.
Yes, it is a genuine doctorate, similar to an MD or DO being a doctorate. If you’re looking for a common qualifier to distinguish PhDs from JDs, the latter are often called “professional doctorates”.
That may be technically true if you pick at it hard enough but most people don’t consider it that way. A doctorate in the U.S. is generally considered to be the highest level of an academic degree and not a professional degree. Plus, there are academic doctorate programs in law that take more schooling than a J.D.
The JD stands for juris doctorate, so I guess in that respect it is a doctorate.
But I have never encountered a lawyer who considered him/herself a “doctor.”
I always consider it closer to a Masters, as it is an initial post-grad degree.
And a JD requires no thesis.
I always thought an advanced law degree - LLM - was the equivalent of a doctorate in law.
But I’ve never paid much attention to degrees, titles and such.
That schooling issue is exactly what I mean. As far as I can tell, the new J.D. is just the old LL.B., re-packaged. No thesis requirement, no independent research - none of the hallmarks of a Ph.D. / S.J.D. It seems inappropriate to call it a doctorate, on par with a Ph.D. / S.J.D.
That seems to be it. There was an item in the *Lawyer’s Weekly *back in July that explained the reason for the change. From the link:
Sure, you can call me doctor!
But no, it ain’t a doctorate in anything but name. We amused ourselves on graduation day by referring to each other as doctor, but I’ve never been addressed that way since, and I wouldn’t expect to be. There may have been a time when the J.D. was more akin to a doctorate, but that’s long past. I suppose I agree that it’s closer to a Masters than anything else, but that too is a poor analogy, because the Master’s degree connotes a deep concentration in a particular area of study, just without a thesis, while the J.D. is more a professional qualification.
Anyway, I take it that in Canada, the route is that you get a Bachelor’s degree after college (probably a B.A. or B.S. for most) and then you can go to law school for some additional years (here it’s 3) and get an LL.B.? If so, then your LL.B. is exactly the same as a J.D. But, as quoted, in England and much of the rest of the Commonwealth, an LL.B. is the undergraduate degree you get if you major in Law – a true Bachelors – and so I understand the impulse to avoid confusion.
–Cliffy
Historically, people studied law, medicine and theology after their regular university courses and so these were what we would think of as modern day doctorates i.e. terminal degrees. This usage you refer to is the carryover we see today and even in Britain today, these doctorates (true doctorates over there) are called higher doctorates.
First a little comment on modern American usage. There are three levels of degrees: bachelor, master and doctor. Associate is a degree true but is not yet considered a separate academic level being used primarily to transfer into a bachelor’s program but I suspect it will be soon by the American Council on Education (ACE). In the U.S., the doctorate is a terminal degree viz. the highest you can get in your field. There is only one research terminal degree, the Ph.D. (confirmed in 1986 by ACE) any other terminal degree is a professional doctorate (cf. Shagnasty’s comment) such as Ed.D. (Doctor of Education), D.S.W. (Doctor of Social Work), D.C. (Doctor of Chiropracty), etc. There are 3 exceptions to doctorate=terminal degree that I know of - Juris Doctor, Medicinae Doctor and Master of Fine Arts (The terminal degree in the arts).
In modern day usage, the J.D. is the equivalent of a master’s degree which in modern terms would be an LL.M (Master of Legal Letters). Statsman is incorrect that it is a professional doctorate. The professional doctorate in law is either the Doctor of Juridicial Science (S.J.D.) or Doctor of Legal Letters (LL.D.) {I believe that is primarally an honorary degree although some may give it out] and even the ABA not dissuades calling lawyers with only a JD “Doctor”.
An MD now is the equivalent of a Master’s in Medicine (MM) and there is not a professional degree for general medicine although some do get a professional terminal degree in their field of practice. Doctors who enter research will often get Ph.D.s as well.
Some style guides consider it improper to refer to your J.D. as a “juris doctorate” in a resume or otherwise professionally, the correct term supposedly being either “juris doctor” or “juris doctor degree.” That’s subject to debate, I suppose, but I make it a point to avoid juris doctorate to be on the safe side and avoid offending PhDs. The J.D. isn’t equivalent to an M.D. or a PhD, but that’s not a slam on the J.D - it’s its own special animal. I liked this quote from Northern Piper in a previous thread so much that I went back and looked it up: “The law degree is an applied study in human interactions - how people deal with each other, how they solve problems in their daily lives, how they organize their affairs, and how they relate to the government and vice versa. In my view, the LL.B./J.D. is a humanities degree.” That’s a pretty good summation.
Heh - I just noticed I quoted the OP to answer the OP. Physician, heal thyself! 
Not a doctorate.
I wore my Ph.D. hood to my law school graduation, though. Smartass.
There is no standard. Only the most pretentious PhD holders consider an MD not a “real” doctor. For statistical purposes, the US Department of Education considers the PhD and EdD equivalent, as well as the Doctor of Public Health, and labels them “doctor’s degrees.” It considers the JD, MD, DPharm, MDiv (Master of Divinity), and DC (Doctor of Chiropractic) to be equivalent “first professional” degrees. I certainly don’t consider the DC equivalent to an MD (or the EdD equivalent to a PhD), but who am I to say? The DOE just lumps degrees together by the number of years they take and whether they qualify you for a licensed profession. The traditional distinction is between “research doctorates,” that is, PhDs, and non-research or “professional doctorates,” that is, MDs, etc., but that distinction has broken down somewhat with the creation of hybrid programs and alternative degrees like the PsyD and ScD (both of which would presumably be regarded as PhD-equivalent degrees by the government, but are designed more along the lines of professional degrees. Except when they’re not.) I say, if your hood has big flaps on the side, you’re a doctor. That doesn’t mean I’m going to let you operate on me.
Too late to add: Don’t forget that all of these degrees are inventions of the last 150 years or so. The real traditional doctorates, whose holders could look down their noses at “mere” PhD holders, are the so-called “higher doctorates,” chiefly and primarily the Doctor of Divinity. These are still awarded (I think) by Oxford and Cambridge, but are unknown in the US except as honorary degrees.
That’s about right. For the most part*, Canadian common law schools will only admit those with Bachelor’s (or higher) degrees. Writing the LSAT is also required. There are three years of law school; during which, as I understand things, the course of study pretty much follows the Langdellian system used by US schools: a good grounding in Contracts, Criminal, Constitutional, Property, and Torts in first year; followed by required courses and electives in the upper years. A course whose grade rests on a research paper will be required at some point; other requirements would include courses in Civil Procedure and Legal Research and Writing, among others. Mooting also plays a large part in the Canadian law school experience, and I understand that every student does a moot in first year. Note that upper-year requirements and electives can vary between schools, but there will always be a first year where the experience is much like that shown in The Paper Chase.
- The reason I say “for the most part” is because Canadian schools will occasionally admit certain students without a Bachelor’s degree. Generally, such students must have put in *at least *two years of work towards a Bachelor’s degree and have extremely high grades/LSAT scores. But their admission is quite uncommon; in my 1L class of 180 students, we had only two such classmates, while the rest of us all had a Bachelor’s, a number also had a Master’s, and two had both of the above plus a Ph.D.
Spoons, B.A., LL.B.
I have a jurisdoctor degree. I do not consider it as prestigious as an M.D. or a PhD. I do consider it as prestigious as an EdD, but that is mostly irritation at assholes like Bill Cosby who think an EdD is something that requires their friends to call them “Dr.” (I know three EdD’s like that.) My M.D. calls me Dr., and I think she is making fun of me. Probably is. But she is the kind of professional that sticks her finger up my butt as part of her “duties”.
Doctor, I understand, means “teacher” in Latin, and healer in English. I am not a professional teacher, nor a healer.
In general I don’t care to address academic degrees as “Dr”, I prefer Professor. “Dr” makes me think of “Dr. Kissinger” or “Dr. Castro”.
But back to JDs. We do not usually do original research for the degree or have boards or a required thesis. I did do a law review style original paper back in the 1980s as part of a non-required class in law school on the issue of drug testing in the workplace. But it was not required for graduation, just my one course and 80 percent of my graduating class did nothing of the sort. It was in no way equivalent to a PhD thesis, more like a college B.S. thesis. (I did not have an undergrad thesis requirement, but did take a graduate seminar that required an original paper on nuclear deterrence theory.)
Any litigator does a hell of a lot of original research as part of the job, but not the degree.
If you want to call a J.D. who is a practicing lawyer something flattering, call him or her “counselor”. It’s not pretentious, it does sound kind of nice and it is what we actually do. I secretly like it when people call me that.
The only people who should be referred to as professors are those who are employed by a university as a professor. Otherwise, it’s not an appropriate title to use.
Agreed. I wasn’t sufficiently clear. With the exceptions of The Professor from Gilligan’s Island and Professor Moriarty.
Non-academically employed PhD’s should be referred to in formal writing as “Dr” and in spoken language as “waiter”.
Why do you say that an SJD is a professional doctorate, and not a terminal research degree? I’ve always understood it to be on par with a Ph.D., in terms of the amount of work that goes into it. Plus, an SJD does not have any additional value to enter the ranks of the profession - it’s purely a research/teaching/academic degree. All you need to enter the profession is a J.D.
Also, it’s not the case that a J.D. is the modern equivalent of a LL.M. The J.D. is the entry level program for legal studies. An LL.M. is a post-graduate degree, after you get your J.D. See, for example, Yale Law School’s summary of their academic programs:
(My underlining.)
That place up in Boston uses the same terms, offering an LL.M. as a post-grad degree after the J.D.
Note as well that neither place offers a Ph.D. in law, which again suggests that the S.J.D. is the terminal academic degree.
Finally, LL.M. doesn’t mean “Master of Legal Letters”. It means “Master of Laws”, just like “LL.B.” means “Bachelor of Laws”.
We’ve got some smart people on these boards. 
What thread was that from?
One more thing, since I have a strange love of degrees and titles and such. If you ever meet someone with an actual MD from Oxford or Cambridge (not an MB BCh or MB BChir, the equivalents of American-style MDs from those schools), they actually possess one of those “higher doctorates,” awarded for a portfolio of substantial professional research in the field of (in this case) medicine. Bow and scrape at your pleasure.