Yeah, your hierarchy makes sense. The only wrinkle is the fact that most law students are fresh out of an undergraduate program and so the JD program is analogous to an MA/MS program in their academic progress/development. It doesn't seem logical that one could collect their BA/BS and just skip the whole MA/MS phase on their way to a doctorate (your concept of the JD). There's a gap there.
I think a lot of the difference has to do with the fact that JDs are considered "professional" degrees. They're hands-on and practical. Schools don't spend much time (if any) talking about the "philosophy" of law. That comes later in LLM and JSD programs. JD programs are all about “pragmatics.” Here's what your appellate brief should look like. Here's how you do research using the Court Reporters or Westlaw. Here's the rule for Anticipatory Repudiation in Contract.
So, I think (and please bear with me, this is all my own take from my general knowledge and experience in the vast realm of academia) that the JD would be better characterized as an advanced kind of baccalaureate degree with a "science" bent for it's technical and practical nature, a JS, a BS in Law? The latter seems highly appropriate in my opinion. To some degree it’s in a class of it's own. I mean you have to hold a BA/BS to go to law school, and the rigor of the curriculum is more akin to a MA/MS level program, but the next step up is the LLM (Master of Laws), then, of course, the coveted JSD (Doctorate of Juridical Science). Seems like an extra step in there to me, coming from the more traditional academic understanding of the heirarchy… BA/BS, MA/MS, PhD, PostDoc fellowship…
I did the BA, MA, now JD route and I have to take issue with the idea of "pissing out" a Master's degree in anything. I mean, my MA program was in Critical Rhetoric, basically an advanced Communication degree. And we all know that Communication isn't rocket science. Hell, it's the degree for people who either aren't smart enough for computer science or physics, don't have the talent to pursue art/music/theater or lack the interest to become philosophers...or a combination. It's a slacker degree, like English or Anthropology, and I admit it, I was a slacker... albeit a slacker with an interest in philosophy and a basic understanding of science/mathematics, so that helped.
Anyway, even my slacker MA degree in Critical Rhetoric was damn hard. Even though we didn't write as regularly as we do in my JD program, we wrote a ton at the end. My thesis was 72 pages of stuff that would put you to sleep in about 3 paragraphs, and I researched it for half of my last (3rd) year and wrote (and rewrote and rewrote ad nauseum) for the last half plus part of the summer (slacker, remember?) I feel like the reading workload was very similar in both my MA and JD programs. Plus we had regular exams and, of course, finals. It was no walk in the park. And, yes, I taught as well.
Keep in mind too, that the anecdote we got in graduate school of the rigor of a subsequent doctoral program (even in Communication) goes something like this… “Your thesis ends up being a chapter in your doctoral dissertation.” Now that’s a shitload of writing. Dissertations are like non-fiction novellas of completely incoherent and unintelligible gibberish. Wait, maybe there is an appropriate comparison to law there… But altogether, I’d say the amount of writing throughout the career of an attorney (JD, LLM or JSD) and an academic PhD is comparable, albeit very different in nature.
As for your stats, a PhD is 60 hours BEYOND the 30 required for an MA/MS, so 90 in total. But a simple tally of numbers falls short of making an appropriate comparison between JD and PhD degrees. Law courses, while they do increase somewhat in difficulty as the program progresses, are basically all the same. We learn rules and their exceptions and (hopefully) how to apply the rules to new fact patterns that we encounter (in hypos, exams, the Bar and practice). Some areas of law (and hence, courses) are more difficult because there are simply more rules (and/or exceptions). In this sense it's a much better comparison to BA/BS programs which are all about learning the rules at work in the particular domain of any academic major.
Compare this to an MA/MS program that builds on the rule-based pragmatic knowledge accumulated in an undergraduate program. Graduate programs attempt to “get behind the curtain” of rules we learned in undergrad and start picking at them asking the “What if…?” questions and growing exponentially more abstract and theoretical as the program progresses. And while JD courses do build on each other, it’s not an abstract or philosophical sort of development. It’s just that later courses add more rules on top of those we learned in earlier courses, in a very linear sort of growth as compared to the exponential and reflexive nature of courses and their increasing complexity in graduate and post-graduate doctoral studies.
This is where the LLM and JSD come into play. In some sense, even many LLM courses are simply more-of-the-same when it comes to the “kind” of learning and approach they require. They delve into finer subsets of rules and exceptions of an area of law (such as taxation or international business) that was only covered facially in the JD program. But, more abstract concepts start working their way into the program as well, foundational materials, the philosophy of law, etc…
Then the JSD seems to me to be something like the Grand Puba of academia, combining the practical and technical nature of Law with the theoretical and abstract nature of Philosophy. Truly a daunting and excruciating program which is the reason there are so few of them. I imagine most are Mensa members too.
Here’s an interesting Wikipedia section of the longer JD entry that discusses the comparison between the Juris “Doctorate” and other types of doctoral degrees.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Juris_Doctor#Comparison_with_other_degreesI haven't read it yet, just googled "hierarchy of academic degrees" and this popped up. Should be a good read.
Thanks for your interesting post. I enjoy the exchange.
deFuturo
