Legal Commentary

I've just finished up a JSD degree and thought it might be useful for some of this blog's readers to hear one person's perspective about whether it is worth it for those interested in law teaching jobs to pursue this course.  A JSD or SJD is a degree offered by a few law schools, ostensibly aimed at and designed for people who are interested in an academic legal career.  Admission always requires having completed an LL.M., sometimes at the school from which one is seeking admission to the JSD.

A couple of qualifications.  These thoughts relate to candidates with U.S. JD degrees who are interested in a position in an American law school.  JSD programs often attract foreign applicants who are interested in positions outside the United States (where a doctoral degree is required for obtaining a position), and those folks populate the ranks of many JSD programs.  I'm not familiar enough with the academic hiring culture abroad to know what value a JSD is perceived to bring.  My thoughts also are directed to people who are interested in the JSD at least in some measure to burnish a CV with a JD from a non-elite law school (say, a school outside the top 5 or 7).  If you graduated with a JD from Yale and decided to pursue the Yale LL.M. and JSD too, this post isn't really for you (though they are rare, I've seen people who are in, if not this exact category, something like it).

One last point before the thoughts.  I absolutely loved my LL.M. and JSD experience.  It gave me just what I wanted and I will always look back with deep fondness on the faculty and friends I got to know, as well as on the extended period of study and reading.  But there programs have benefits and risks, and I think it's right to be open about them.

 1. Go for the professors.  By far the most important reason to do a JSD is that you want to spend a significant period of time interacting with and having your work read and criticized by teachers whom you admire and who are interested in being mentors to you.  This is the single greatest value of the JSD experience.  One may ask, 'But how do I know who those professors are, in advance of applying for the JSD?'  One way you will come to know is by pursuing the LL.M. at the same institution.  If you are thinking about a JSD, you ought to use the LL.M. year to gather as much information about your prosepctive JSD professors as you can.  That means that before you even apply for the LL.M., you ought to have a quite distinct idea about the field of study that you want to pursue, the range of courses (seminars, primarily) that you will take, who teaches those seminars, what those professors have written, how those professors are generally regarded by students, and, how those professors are regarded by their peers.  You should have a sense for how important those professors are, and how strong the school's reputation is, for your chosen field.  It's also a good idea to make contact with those professors before arriving.  Chances are that they won't immediately respond to your inquiries, so keep after them.  Try to get a sense for whether they are receptive to LL.M. students taking their seminars.  Even shove a little bit of your writing at them, to see if they are open to taking a look.  That's all before even getting to the law school. 

All of this means that before you go, you ought to know what you want to specialize in, have read as much as possible in that field, know who the professors are at the University with whom you want to study, know and have read what those professors have written in the field, and know as much as possible about those professors and the academic reputation of the school in your desired area of expertise. 

After you get there, recognize that you need to begin in earnest to connect with those professors and immerse yourself in the literature with which they are expert.  In fact, it's better if you begin this immersion before you arrive at the school, because the moment you arrive, you will begin to need to impress.  And that means, you will need to be presenting written work product, rather quickly and in a consistent stream, for them to evaluate. You will need their warm recommendation when you apply, first, for the JSD program, and, second, for a position later on.

2.  Go to write, not only to read.  The mistake that I think some people make with these programs is to think of them as a period where you can sort of just read for years in the subject of your choice, undisturbed and at your leisure.  Deep reading within your particular, chosen field is an important component of the JSD experience.  But if you want to get an academic position after the JSD, it is absolutely vital that you write, and write constantly.  The reason is not only that you want to use the time to get published.  It is also, and even more importantly, that you want to develop a scholarly relationship with your chosen mentors/professors.  The only way really to do that is to be producing work in a steady stream -- that's the only way to cultivate a scholarly repartee with your professors, and it's absolutely crucial that they begin to think of you in these terms -- as young scholars, rather than as one of their JD students (or perhaps as something less than that) -- as quickly as possible after your arrival.

3.  Only go to the absolute top schools in the country.  Since you are using the JSD as a way to polish up what will be perceived as some ugly soiling on your CV, you must only go to one of the best schools in the country.  I won't create some sort of artificial line of demarcation here, but Yale, Harvard, Stanford, Columbia, and NYU all have strong programs in graduate legal education.  When I applied, I was under the impression that Chicago's JSD was open only to foreign graduates, but I just checked their site and saw that the LL.M. is open to domestic types and didn't see any limitation on their JSD site.  At all events, since you will be using the JSD as a cleansing agent, you want to get as clean as possible.  It is also generally (not universally, but generally) the case that professors at higher ranked schools have achieved a greater reputation among their peers.  If you will be investing 4-6 years in this venture, you want to take advantage of all of that.

4.  Do not think that the JSD is the equivalent of a Ph.D.  It plainly and unequivocally is not.  A Ph.D. trains you systematically in the methods and substance of a discrete non-legal field.  A JSD does not do this.  In a few JSD programs, there is some formal coursework related to legal history, legal methods, legal theory, perhaps even jurisprudence, but there is no standardized formal training that compares to the Ph.D.  By and large, the person who should do the JSD is someone who already has zeroed in on a particular legal field and has identified legal scholars in that field with whom he or she wants to spend several years in an extended academic 'conversation.'  By the end of a Ph.D., my impression is that graduates have command of an entire extra-legal discipline and thorough knowledge of a sub-discipline in that subject.  By the end of a JSD, graduates will have deep knowledge of particular features or elements of a legal sub-discipline.  The increasing specialization of legal knowledge, and the heightening pressures on entry-level candidates to be sub-sub-disciplinary experts from the get-go, make the degree worth pursuing for those with the time and inclination.  But it isn't removely the same as a Ph.D.

5.  Know that the JSD degree itself will not be universally respected by academic employers.  Because it is not a Ph.D., some legal academic employers will not know what to make of the degree.  It will be incumbent on you to explain why you pursued it and what you gained from it.  In my case, it was without question the chance to work closely with and get to know the faculty that were my mentors -- to know their work inside and out, as well as the sub-disciplines of which their work formed a part, and to begin to think systematically about something large that I wanted to say in one or more of those sub-disciplines.  It was also the chance to participate in the intellectual life of a law school -- to get to know its customs and manners of interaction.  Perhaps unlike the Ph.D., this all needs to be spelled out clearly when one is coming with a JSD (or as a JSD candidate).    

In all, I think the JSD experience can be a very worthwhile one.  Time will tell whether it catches on for more domestic JD graduates.  But it is definitely one that needs somebody with an internal motor and some-what laser-like sense of what one wants to get out of the experience, right from the get-go.  It also takes a kind of willfully mule-like cheerfulness, because if you really take to heart all those people telling you that you'll never get a job with a JSD, you won't.