Harvard Law School Dean Christopher Columbus Langdell (1822 to 1906) is credited with coming up with the bachelor of laws degree or LL.B. Even then, most states did not require people to get a law school degree to practice law; most people entered law practice by apprenticing for lawyers. With rising standards of practicing law, however, most states began to require law degrees. By the 1950s, the LL.B. had morphed into the legum magister or LL.M. (master of laws) degree. Within a decade, with the increase of requirements demanded from law schools nationwide, the J.D. replaced the LL.M. as the primary degree.
In the United States, earning the J.D. requires four years of undergraduate study and three years of law school. This puts them in the same length of study period as Ph.D. (doctor of philosophy) and M.D. (doctor of medicine) programs. The J.D. is a professional doctoral degree. This means that the degree is conferred on people engaged in a profession; in this case, the profession is law. In that, it is similar to the M.D., which is for people who practice medicine.
The J.D. is different from the Ph.D., which is a doctoral degree for scholarly research. Nevertheless, the J.D. is a terminal doctorate, which is a term used for the highest degree in a given field of study. In this case, the J.D. is the terminal degree for the professional tract in law. Thus J.D. holders are qualified to teach law in colleges and universities.
A bachelor's degree and Law School Admission Test (LSAT) scores are the two major requirements for applying to a J.D. program. In the first year, students are required to take general subjects such as civil procedure, real estate or property law, contracts, legal writing, constitutional law, criminal law and torts. The curriculum is designed for full-time students to earn the J.D. degree in three years and for part-timers to earn it in four years. The J.D. must be earned from a law school accredited by the American Bar Association (ABA) and graduates must pass the bar exams in the states in which they want to practice.
Although the J.D. is the most common law degree in the United States., it is not the most advanced. J.D. holders can go back to law school to earn an LL.M., which is now elevated as a one-year post-graduate program for specialization in areas of the law. The scientiae juridicae doctor or S.J.D. (doctor of juridical science)--provided by a handful of U.S. law schools--is a four-year program for those who want to be legal researchers as well as educators.