thumb|Juris Doctor diploma from [[Columbia Law School|292x292px]]

A Juris Doctor, Doctor of Jurisprudence, or Doctor of Law (JD), is a graduate-entry professional degree that primarily prepares individuals to practice law. In the United States and the Philippines, it is the only qualifying law degree. Other jurisdictions, such as Australia, Canada, and Hong Kong, offer both the postgraduate JD degree as well as the undergraduate Bachelor of Laws, Bachelor of Civil Law, or other qualifying law degree.

First introduced by the University of Chicago Law School in the United States in 1902, the degree generally requires three years of full-time study to complete and is conferred upon students who have successfully completed coursework and practical training in legal studies. The JD curriculum typically includes fundamental legal subjects such as constitutional law, civil procedure, criminal law, contracts, property, and torts, along with opportunities for specialization in areas like international law, corporate law, or public policy. Upon receiving a JD, graduates must pass a bar examination to be licensed to practice law. The American Bar Association does not allow an accredited JD degree to be issued in less than two years of law school studies.

In the United States, the JD has the academic standing of a professional doctorate (in contrast to a research doctorate), and is described as a "doctor's degree – professional practice" by the United States Department of Education's National Center for Education Statistics. In Australia, South Korea, and Hong Kong, it has the academic standing of a master's degree, while in Canada it is considered a second-entry bachelor's degree. except from the state of Wisconsin. The United States Patent and Trademark Office also involves a specialized "Patent Bar" which requires applicants to hold a bachelor's degree or the equivalent in certain scientific or engineering fields alongside their Juris Doctor degree in order to practice in patent cases —prosecuting patent applications — before it. This additional requirement does not apply to the litigation of patent-related matters in state and federal courts.

Etymology and abbreviations

In the United States, the professional doctorate in law may be conferred in Latin or in English as Juris Doctor (sometimes shown on Latin diplomas in the accusative form ) and at some law schools Doctor of Law (JD), or Doctor of Jurisprudence (also abbreviated JD). "Juris Doctor" literally means "teacher of law", while the Latin for "Doctor of Jurisprudence" () literally means "teacher of legal knowledge". The JSD and SJD are equivalent to PhD degrees in law, while the LLD may be equivalent to the PhD or may be a higher doctorate. The JD differs from the Doctor of the Science of Law (; JSD), Doctor of Juridical Science (; SJD), or Doctor of Laws (; LLD). In the US, the JSD and SJD both require students to hold a JD and a Master of Laws (LLM); the JSD is for those wanting to pursue an academic career in the US, while the SJD is typically for students who are pursuing careers as professors of law at universities in other countries.

Historical context

Origins of the law degree

The first university in Europe, the University of Bologna, was founded as a school of law by four famous legal scholars in the 11th century who were students of the glossator school in that city. This served as the model for other law schools of the Middle Ages, and other early universities such as the University of Padua. The first academic degrees may have been doctorates in civil law () followed by canon law (). These were not professional degrees but rather indicated that their holders had been approved to teach at the universities. While Bologna granted only doctorates, preparatory degrees (bachelor's and licences) were introduced in Paris and then in the English universities.

right|thumb|The [[Inns of Court of London served as a professional school for lawyers in England.]]

During the medieval period, the teaching of law at Cambridge and Oxford Universities was mainly for philosophical or scholarly purposes and not meant to prepare one to practice law.

The 1728 act was amended in 1821 to reduce the period of the required apprenticeship to three years for graduates from Oxford, Cambridge, and Dublin, as "the admission of such graduates should be facilitated, in consideration of the learning and abilities requisite for taking such degree". This was extended in 1837 to cover the newly established universities of Durham and London, and again in 1851 to include the new Queen's University of Ireland. The Inns of Court continued but became less effective, and admission to the bar still did not require any significant educational activity or examination. In 1846, Parliament examined the education and training of prospective barristers and found the system to be inferior to that of Europe and the United States, as Britain did not regulate the admission of barristers. were postgraduate degrees. The Cambridge degree was an exception: it took six years from matriculation to complete, but only three of these had to be in residence, and the BA was not required (although those not holding a BA had to produce a certificate to prove they had not only been in residence but had actually attended lectures for at least three terms). These degrees specialized in Roman civil law rather than in English common law, the latter being the domain of the Inns of Court, and thus they were more theoretical than practical. Cambridge re-established its LLB degree in 1858 as an undergraduate course alongside the BA, and the London LLB, which had previously required a minimum of one year after the BA, become an undergraduate degree in 1866. The older nomenclature continues to be used for the BCL at Oxford today, which is a master's level program, while Cambridge moved its LLB back to being a postgraduate degree in 1922 but only renamed it as the LLM in 1982.

Between the 1960s and the 1990s, law schools in England took on a more central role in the preparation of lawyers and consequently improved their coverage of advanced legal topics to become more professionally relevant. Over the same period, American law schools became more scholarly and less professionally oriented, so that in 1996 Langbein could write: "That contrast between English law schools as temples of scholarship and American law schools as training centers for the profession no longer bears the remotest relation to reality". The apprenticeship programs often employed the trainee with menial tasks, and while they were well trained in the day-to-day operations of a law office, they were generally unprepared practitioners or legal reasoners.

The first university law programs in the United States, such as that of the University of Maryland established in 1812, included much theoretical and philosophical study, including works such as the Bible, Cicero, Seneca, Aristotle, Adam Smith, Montesquieu and Grotius.