Belle Lettre on Moneylaw? Check out Belle Lettre Tries To Explain Herself, or "Just What Is an L.L.M. Anyway?!" Here is a taste:
The LLM degree, or "Masters of Laws," is an advanced legal degree that is best explained to other grad students, lay people, and your immigrant parents as a "post doctoral." Of course, it isn’t really. But it helps to explain to the non-aspiring law profs (indeed, my lawyer friends asked what the heck I was doing) why you are going back to school. I get a lot of "I thought you already graduated?" questions and looks. In a way, it is a post doctoral, if you translate the "Juris Doctor" of the J.D. degree literally from the Latin. So if I have a "doctor of laws," why then am I now pursuing a "master of laws"? And why, after the masters of law, am I going to pursue this thing called a "doctor of juridical science" (JSD)?! How is that more doctoral than a juris doctor? How is it even different?
Yeah! What’s up with LLMs & SJDs? Of course, we all know the history. The LLM & LLD were advanced degrees that followed the LLB–the Bachelor of Laws that was the degree awarded at the end of law school. The LLB was a very funny Bachelor’s degree, because you could only get it after completing a four-year Bachelor’s in something else–although there were a few programs that allowed students to combine the LLB with an undergraduate program. But when the LLB became the JD, the nomenclature for the LLM & LLD made no sense. The JD & LLB are professional degrees–they qualify one to be a practising lawyer.
And there are really two entirely different species of LLM. One is a degree that is intended as an advanced professional certificate: the LLM in tax for pratictioners is the paradigm case. The other is intended as an academic/research degree. That’s the kind of LLM Belle is pursuing. That LLM really only makes sense as the analog to a MA in a PhD program–a masters that is intended to lead to an advanced research doctorate, which is the modern SJD/JSD. But this story is further complicated by the neglect of SJD programs by most law schools. The SJD degree had no underlying program that would be comparable to a PhD program. There might be one or two special courses for SJD students, but most of their course work would simply be courses selected from the JD curriculum. That was a travesty, of course, and provosts & law faculties should be ashamed of themselves for allowing this state of affairs to exist. Since the SJD degree was really just a loosely supervised dissertation plus a bunch of JD courses, the degree was in many cases not worth much as a qualification for a legal academic job in the United States. SJD students tended to be foreign students seeking certification from a prestigious U.S. law school or American law students from weak JD programs that sought to "upgrade" their credentials. There were exceptions, of course: some SJD dissertations were simply great and landed their authors great jobs.
All of this has begun to change in recent years. SJD programs have become more rigiorous–both in response to the push for increased academic rigor in the legal academy and as a result of more discerning consumers of the SJD curriculum. One example of the latter phenomenon is the influx of Israeli SJD students–themselves responding to the requirement of an advanced doctorate in law as a teaching qualification in Israeli universities. These students (and others like them) expected a rigorous doctoral program, and whether they knew it or not, pushed law schools to make their SJD programs more like PhD programs elsewhere in major research universities.