A faculty member at a liberal arts college, advising students thinking about law school, has written with the following question (and suggested that I might post an answer on the blog site, for the benefit of others who might be interested):
"What is your opinion of a combination/sequence of JD, LLM [Master of Law degree] then Doctor of Juridical Science (S.J.D.) from one of the top 15 law schools (at least for those that offer the SJD). I am thinking of those prominent law schools known for producing law school teachers/scholars. I am hoping you might be able to offer your perspective in comparison to a joint JD/Ph.D. or JD/D.Phil. combination."
My answer to this question has something to do with some of the changes in the legal academy over the last generation, noted in my earlier posting on why it is easier to get tenure in law schools (see esp. paragraph 4 there, on the interdisciplinary turn in legal education that began in the 1970s).
The brief answer is: I do not recommend the SJD for someone wanting to get in to law teaching; the JD/PhD is much more useful (and now much more common).
Here is the longer answer:
Prior to the 1970s, it was more common for someone who wanted to go in to law teaching to earn the SJD: indeed, that was really the only point of getting that degree. Even then, most law teachers had only the basic law degree, but a higher percentage then than now would earn one of the "graduate" law degrees.
The SJD as an option for American-trained lawyers has become much less popular, even as the JD/PhD (in economics or history or political science or psychology or philosophy) has become much more common. The two developments are related. The interdisciplionary turn in legal education which started in the 1970s now has a foothold almost everywhere, with the result that increasingly high-quality economics, game theory, empirical psychology, philosophy, and history are being brought to bear on law and legal problems. That has made it all the more valuable for aspiring law teachers to have appropriate training in the cognate discipline, which typically means the PhD. When law was more clearly an "autonomous" discipline, then a PhD in law, as preparation for a career in legal scholarship, made sense. Law is no longer an "autonomous" scholarly discipline, and so a PhD in law, as a result, makes less sense.
These days, most of those who actually get SJDs are foreign lawyers, for whom the SJD really serves the purpose that the JD or JD/LLM serves for American lawyers. But I would not encourage those earning the American JD to think about getting the SJD as a stepping stone to teaching. (There are some reasons for American JD holders to get the LLM degree--which takes less time--which are discussed here [see the discussion of Path B for getting in to law teaching].)
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