I once had a priest who had previously taught in seminary and had earned a doctorate in theology (Th.D). Colloquially he was known as Father Jake but formally as “The Reverend Doctor Jacob Smith.”
Theoretically (a least) it doesn’t always work out that way. From the Wikipedia entry for Gary Null, PhD (self-styled nutrition expert, antivaxer, AIDS denialist and leading figure in the world of woo):
*"Null holds a Ph.D. in human nutrition and public health sciences from Union Institute & University, a private distance-learning college headquartered in Cincinnati, Ohio. Null’s doctoral thesis was entitled “A Study of Psychological and Physiological Effects of Caffeine on Human Health”.
His credentials, including the degree-granting practices at Edison State and the rigor of the Ph.D. program at Union Institute, have been questioned by Stephen Barrett on his Quackwatch website, who labeled Null as “one of the nation’s leading promoters of dubious treatment for serious disease” and a fraud. The Union Institute’s Ph.D. program came under scrutiny by the Ohio Board of Regents in the late 1990s, early 2000s which culminated in its 2002 Reauthorization Report. The report was critical of the Union Institute’s Ph.D. program, noting in particular that " … expectations for student scholarship at the doctoral level were not as rigorous as is common for doctoral work … " (OBR 2002 Reauthorization Report, page 13) As a result, The Union was put on probation, the Union Graduate School was dissolved and the Ph.D. program was restructured.*
*Null is the guy who sued the company making “Gary Null’s Ultimate Power Meal”, claiming that it seriously poisoned him due to a massive overdosage of vitamin D. 
**it’s also likely true that not all M.D. degrees are created equally.
Minor addendum: A PhD is in recognition of a substantive expansion of the sum of human knowledge. Every research paper ever published expands the sum of human knowledge a little, but most of them aren’t big enough to count for a PhD.
I would agree that the J.D. is not a doctorate, but neither is it just a degree with “doctor” in the title. It is a post-graduate degree, since an applicant must have a degree in some discipline to apply for the J.D. program. “Juris Doctor” is intended to be a more accurate description of the degree than the older degree of Bachelor of Laws (LL.B.), which on its face sounded like it was a first level degree, like a B.A. or B.Sc. Actually, to get into the LL.B. programs by the mid-20th century, applicants normally needed to already have a bachelor’s degree of some sort.
As DSYoungEsq mentions, the J.D. was first proposed as an alternative to the LL.B. in the 19th century, but it didn’t really take off in the US until the mid-1960s, and in Canada from about 2000 onwards.
Nor is a J.D. a specialist degree, like a masters degree. To earn the J.D., the applicant has to take a wide range of legal courses. Some limited spécialisation is possible, based on the course offerings of one’s law school, but it is meant to be the general degree to prepare one for legal practice.
There are two subsequent legal degrees: the Master of Laws and the doctorate.
The Master of Laws degree (LL.M.) can be a specialist degree (tax law, energy law, constitutional law, etc.), for those who want to practise solely in a particular area of law.
It can also be the first step toward the legal doctorate, for those who want to become legal academics.
However, in Canada and the US, the academic doctorate is not called a Doctor of Laws (LL.D.). That degree is usually an honorary degree in Canada and the US. Instead, the academic doctorate is the S.J.D. / D.J.S. or some variant (“Doctor of Juridical Science” in English; various Latin variants). Different law schools use different names for the doctoral degree, which is usually considered the equivalent of a Ph.D.
N. Piper, B.A., LL.B, LL.B., LL.M.
So that makes the JD degree somewhere in between a bachelor’s and a master’s. That’s fine, there’s nothing that says that every field must have the same number of degree-levels. But there’s no way to go from “between bachelor’s and master’s” to “a kind of doctorate”.
Except the J.D. is the terminal professional degree. No-one needs to have an LL.M. or an S.J.D. to practise law.
As well, a J.D. can be enough to teach law at law school, which after all is the original meaning of “doctor” - one who teaches from specialised knowledge.
Overall, the legal degrees don’t fit neatly into any schéma, because of the interaction between the professional role and the academic role.
Because the OP had a vague thought while staring into his cornflakes this morning, and he decided to start a thread about it. It’s what he does.
He will, in all likelihood, not be back to answer your (very pertinent) question. Of the (literally thousands of) threads he has started on this message board over the past 16 years or so on this message board, in a significant majority he does not return to continue the discussion, or respond in any sustained manner to the questions and criticisms and arguments directed at him by other posters.
This is not a criticism. It’s simply a factual observation based on a decade and a half of seeing his threads on the front page of various forums on this message board. Some of his threads end up attracting a significant number of posts, and producing good information and interesting discussion. It’s just that the OP is generally not actually involved in any of those developments.
The situation is somewhat different outside of North America.
In Australia, for example, the LL.B. is taken as an undergraduate degree, but almost always alongside another degree, such as a B.A., a B.Sc., a B.Ec, etc. I’m not sure if things have changed at all since i left Australia, but when i was there, it was almost impossible to do an LL.B. by itself. You were admitted as an Arts/Law or Science/Law or Economics/Law student, and you did the two degrees concurrently, with law classes generally beginning in the second year of the program.
Yes, a PhD in engineering. Back in the day RPI offered the choice of PhD and D.Eng programs. To a certain extent it was cosmetic, for the PhD you emphasized the novelty of your work in a dissertation, for the D.Eng you emphasized the planning and execution in an engineering project.
Then again, though, nobody needs a PhD to practice physics, either. There are a lot of physicists with master’s degrees working in industry, and even more engineers with master’s degrees. A master’s, or even a bachelor’s, can be a terminal degree, in that you can get a job with one, but there are still other degrees beyond it.
I will let the other responses to this deal with the nuts and bolts of this statement. I will simply point out that your assertion is without merit for the simple reason that:
Juris Doctor is a doctoral degree of sorts, for the very reason you point out - it has the word “doctor” in it. It is, therefore, a doctoral degree “of sorts”.
For obvious reasons, it should not be considered the equivalent of a Ph.D. That’s the LL.D. And please, everyone else, it is NOT L.L.D.; the “LL” uses the old abbreviation technique of doubling the letter to indicate you are using the plural: “laws”.
There are universities in the US which allow J.D.s to wear doctoral regalia at graduation. I don’t think we did at Univ. of the Pacific (McGeorge School of Law) when I graduated in 1986, though the one photo I have is not clear; the robe is faced with black velvet and I cannot tell what the sleeves were doing. There is a hood; it’s purple. I see from recent photos that the J.D.s do not wear hoods at my alma mater, now, but do graduate with robes that have purple velvet trim, including sleeve bands. So there is no consensus among academic institutions as to whether to equate the J.D. with other “doctoral” degrees.
My personal opinion is that the proliferation of “doctoral” degrees awarded has made the distinction relatively meaningless. In the state of Ohio, teachers are (or were at the time I got my licensing education work completed) required to get M.Ed.s within seven years of having been first licensed; D.Ed.s got substantial salary boosts. Not shockingly, there were a proliferation of these degrees awarded, and since anyone who was going to stay in the profession HAD to get a M.Ed., the programs were quite watered-down. It’s only my opinion, but I don’t consider most D.Ed.s to be worthy of being called “doctor” anything.
Now, one particular thing of note no one has addressed:
M.D.s were handed out in America WELL before Ph.D.s were. The M.D. is, therefore, in this country, an older degree. Ph.D.s were not handed out at all here until the mid-1800s, and were rare until the 1900s. Other doctorates would at times be awarded, but they were very, very rare. So the idea that an “M.D.” is some sort of johnny-come-lately ersatz “doctor” is probably not supported by the evidence, at least as far as America goes.
As someone who’s had to read some Ed.D. (the more common way of denoting the degree, in my experience) theses in the course of my work, I must express considerable agreement with this. I’ve read some education doctoral theses that, in my opinion, would only just qualify as a Masters thesis, in terms of the amount of work and, more importantly, the sophistication of the findings and the analysis.
There are some outstanding Ed.D.s, and many amazing people with Ph.D.s in education, but the Ed.D. field has a significant number of people whose work does not really (IMO) come up to regular doctoral standards.
Yeah, but no-one has seriously argued this to be the case. The only people who have really raised this issue in this thread are people pushing back at the OP’s (rather silly and poorly formulated) argument that the term Ph.D. deprives medical doctors of proper prestige and cheapens the value and respect they are accorded in society.
If the OP wants to find some sort of relatively viable measure of “value and respect,” maybe he can head off and check out the median salaries of Americans with MDs, and compare it to the median salaries of people with PhDs. That might tell him a little bit about which one tends to be more respected and valued.
Your point about the relatively late arrival of PhDs is right, and in considerable measure that reflects the fact that the PhD emerged in its modern research-oriented form, especially in the United States, alongside the decline of the classical curriculum and the rise of increasingly specialized academic disciplines. The doctorate is, in a real sense, largely about specialized knowledge. Medicine had always been a relatively specialized area of study (along with the other two major professions, law and the clergy), but it’s only really in the second half of the nineteenth century that we see the emergence of discrete disciplines such as history, economics, political science, sociology, psychology, etc., etc., etc.
These topics had all, of course, been part of human knowledge and study for centuries, but they were often combined in the old classical curriculum under more general headings like philosophy or moral philosophy or political economy or whatever. The late 19th century saw them hive off into discrete subject areas,with increasingly specialized areas of focus and distinct sets of methods and practices and intellectual habits. They saw themselves, increasingly, as professions, although many of these academic professions never got the same level of control over their standards, or authority within society, that professions such as medicine and law were able to achieve.
The late 1800s saw the emergence of professional organizations, such as the American Historical Association, American Economic Association, American Sociological Association, American Political Science Association, etc., and this went along with the increasing fragmentation of universities into separate schools and departments. Much of this was pushed, to a considerable extent, by my own graduate school, Johns Hopkins, which was founded in 1876 as the first American university to fully embrace the research model and PhD that had been the hallmark of German scholarship.
It’s interesting, too, that some western countries “professionalized” even later, in terms of academia and the PhD. While the PhD became, by early in the 20th century, the basic requirement for academic appointment at respectable American universities, countries like the UK and Australia stuck with the older classical system and shunned the doctorate, at least in the humanities (i’m not as familiar with the historical trajectory of the hard sciences), for a longer period. At a time when the majority of American history professors, for example, had a doctorate, the MA was often sufficient for a teaching post in the UK and Australia. A few Australian scholars travelled overseas to get a PhD, but more went to England and got MAs at Oxford and Cambridge, reflecting the continuing Aussie tendency at the time to defer to (perceived) British superiority in matters intellectual. Australia didn’t award its first doctorate in history until after WWII, with the founding of the Australian National University.
Is someone with a MS authorized to doctor the data, if it is not reflecting the desired result?
Eh, everyone knows the post-doctoral degrees are where it’s at, the habilitations and so on.
Soon, they’ll be too crowded to represent Real Ultimate Power, and we’ll need rehabilitations and, I dunno, a few tens of thousands of more dollars worth of paperwork.
DSYoungEsq, just curious - what universities award LL.D. degrees as an academic degree, rather than an honorary one? I just googled the Harvard, Yale, Chicago and Stanford grad programs, and they all award the SJD as the equivalent to a Ph.D. In law. (I’m not going to Google every US law school to check this, but those four tend to be leaders in post-grad legal studies, so I thought I’d check them.)
Sorry, I was being imprecise in tense, to be succinct in exposition.
Interestingly, the S.J.D. degree in the United States appears these days to be primarily, if not exclusively, used by foreign students, rather than domestic students. Indeed, Yale University has instituted a Ph.D. in Law, which is designed for J.D. students who wish to become “legal scholars and teachers.” See Ph.D. Program - Yale Law School “The Ph.D. in Law Degree”. See for further information on the current status of foreign students in S.J.D. programs: The History of the Advanced Degree in Law in the
United States
Its taken me until now, to realize the OP title was based on a popular Bugs Bunny saying and not having a stroke when the title was written.
I’m an idiot