A Matter of Degree

Four years of college. Three years of law school. Bar exams. After all that, should a man be merely a bachelor of laws? Yes, say Harvard, Yale and Columbia. No, say 65 other U.S. law schools, including highly regarded Michigan, Northwestern, Wisconsin. So saying, the 65 have all abolished the LL.B., in whole or in part, and instituted the degree of J.D.--Juris Doctor.

In the 19th century, American lawyers were clearly entitled only to bachelor's degrees because they could enter law school straight from high school without college work. There was a promise of change in 1900 when the University of Chicago required college diplomas for law school admission, and duly began granting the graduate-level J.D. Impressed, the Harvard law faculty voted to follow suit. And the 1904 Harvard Law Review, which boasted editors like Felix Frankfurter, assailed "the anomaly of requiring a bachelor's degree for admission, and granting only a degree of the same nature at the end of the three years' course." But the university administration refused to abandon the bachelor's degree, and vetoed the law faculty's decision. For the Big Three, the status quo is now almost a matter of quaint pride.

Upgrading v. Renaming. Not so for lesser law schools, scrambling for higher status, better students and more foundation funds. Moreover, claims Oklahoma City University Law Dean John G. Hervey, a lawyer with a mere LL.B. is outranked by any Ph.D. when it comes to jobs, pay and promotion in teaching and government. Most of Hervey's "evidence" fails to impress skeptics, who point out that law professors are the country's highest paid teachers, whatever their degrees. And what Supreme Court law clerk was ever picked because he had a J.D. rather than an LL.B.? Whether in the armed forces or the Justice Department, say J.D. critics, the way to get a good Government legal job is to make good grades in a good law school. They propose upgrading law schools instead of renaming law degrees. Harvard's Law Dean Erwin N. Griswold calls the J.D. movement "unwise, unsound and undesirable."

All the same, the idea of granting a J.D. to every law graduate (providing he also has a B.A.) has now been approved by both the American Bar Association and the American Association of Law Schools. As a result, 31% of accredited law school graduates were awarded the new degree in 1965-66, compared with 6% in 1961, and the percentage is apparently bound to rise.

The trend is bound to cause confusion. For one thing, old LL.B. grads are already demanding retroactive J.D.s. For another, the J.D. can be easily mixed up with the honorary degree of doctor of laws (LL.D.) and two rarely earned graduate degrees, which it may also dilute--master of laws (LL.M.) and doctor of juridical science (S.J.D.). Moreover, there are actually two kinds of J.D. One is the automatic label that some schools now give to all graduates; the other goes only to those who graduate at the top of their classes. This has been the longtime practice at several leading Midwestern schools. The question is, how to tell the difference? Obviously by the quality of the graduate's training--in which case the argument is right back where it started.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.