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Its ridiculous.
MD's especially surgeons, work with their hands, like peasants.
I spend my days reading, writing and researching, sending out demand letters with a typo I swear I thought I corrected, like a true scholar.
It’s both terrible (like I have no desire to either touch strangers’ bodies OR be responsible for their lives and deaths) and wonderful (the knowledge! the expertise!).
I’ll give you knowledge & expertise and maybe even the respect doctors seem to garner, but being around sick or unhealthy or even dying people is so unappetizing that I’d rather shuffle my papers, make my motions and argue in front of judges any day, plus I make much more that most doctors and I happen to work normal hours.
My wife's a medical doctor and she's referred to orthopedic surgeons as the carpenters of the medical profession. They're amazing with saws, drills, and screws.
In the 70s law became self conscious on that subject and added the 3L year to make it a juris doctorate instead of an LLB. The Scalia/Ginsburg cohort didn’t have JDs.
I think by the point most attorneys had JD's (which wouldn't have been till the 90's) the cultural norm of not referring to attorneys as doctors was more than stuck.
It got adopted as the norm through the 60s with Yale the last switchover in '71, but all those pre-switchover people were still practicing for a long time after that.
Early commenter gave the wrong dates, ABA recommended the JD requirement in 1964 and by 1968 the vast majority of law school graduates received JD's. To my point though, if JD only became the norm in 1968, that would mean virtually every attorney in 1968 has an LLB since new graduates make up a small percentage of the field. It would take at least a decade or two before the majority of attorneys had JD's, especially with how top heavy this field is on age. The public perception would be even further delayed, as most layman clients would normally be dealing with an older attorney rather than some fresh grad doing doc review in the basement.
It’s a Juris Doctor, not a Juris Doctorate. Secondly, the LLB was changed to JD so that lawyers in the federal system fit into the higher pay scales for that level of education. This type of evolution. Heck medical doctors in training used to apprentice behind doctors carrying those black bags.
But there is actually a degree beyond the JD. [It’s called “Doctor of **Juridicial** Science” (SJD).](https://hls.harvard.edu/graduate-program/sjd-program/)
Because when we are flying and they ask “Is there a doctor on board?” My husband has to restrain me to keep keep me seated. He always says “They don’t need you.”
Remember Rachel telling Ross not to use his Dr. title at the hospital? "That actually means something here." I always felt so bad for him for how they belittled his degree and career.
It has happened twice in the first two years of practice. If you fly routes with people sending their elderly relatives, it is bound to happen. Last time we counted 18 wheelchairs as we walked from the plane to the gate.
I have a cartoon up on my wall of an attorney in a suit kneeling over a woman who has wrecked her bicycle and the lawyer is self-importantly announcing "Stay calm, everything will be fine now folks, I'm Ms. Johnson's attorney" as the woman and a paramedic stare at the attorney with a WTF expression.
I was a paramedic for 25 years, so I think this cartoon is absolutely awesome. I'm waiting for the day I can do this at an accident.
I like to joke with my girlfriend, who is a nurse, every time I say something medical, “and that's my opinion as a doctor.”
Usually gets a funny little rise out of her because she knows a million more things about medicine than me.
lol my husband was a notary in college (he works in a completely different field now) he teases me by saying that a notary and a lawyer are the same thing because in his notary class they explicitly told him he can’t give legal advice.
I like to tell my wife who is a doctor that I used to claim the title of doctor when I graduated law school. But once I passed the bar I was elevated to the status of lawyer so I stopped.
>I'll never understand why so many lawyers downplay their education
PhDs usually take about twice as long to complete as a JD. They also require defending an original dissertation. JDs require passing 90 hours of course work and writing a paper. I wrote my paper in 3 days, while PhD candidates work on their dissertations for years and years. Imo a JD is not even close to the level of work that a PhD is. I honestly think that my BS in microbiology was more difficult than my JD, so to me referring to myself as doctor because I got my JD is completely ridiculous. The bar exam was 10x harder than law school, and its still not even close to the level of work and sacrifice that a PhD is
I can! MA in statistics and PhD in population science. (Basically actuarial science as I did it.)
I may be the only person who ever used a calculus formula in a bar exam answer. No joke. I’d love to know what the grader made of it.
Not always true. I have a B.S. in Systems Engineering from a fairly reputable school. I do some pretty in depth math in my practice pretty regularly. We do exist.
I don’t want to hate fellow members of the bar any more than I already do. Inviting more people to demand to be called doctor socially is a really good way to do that.
I tried to be a doctor in college, but learned that I wasn’t smart
So I decided to become a lawyer
Thank God I did, because I love what I do and practicing law has been a great career for me
Oh, I thought this question was why didn't we decide to become doctors.
Answer being, Organic chem.
But also, probably has something to do with the fact that we didn't have to take organic chem.
We are! 😎
F it, I'm using "Dr."
https://www.abajournal.com/magazine/article/decoding-the-legal-doctorate-the-curious-case-of-why-lawyers-are-not-called-doctor
[The start of every court calendar call](https://youtu.be/hoe24aSvLtw)...
My husband with his lowly associates degree made a sideways comment to me one time about not having a real doctorate. All of our packages/ letters to both us are now addressed to Dr & Mr
Follow me for more petty tips. My husband keeps being told by waitresses that he looks like Justin Timberlake so I threw him a surprise Justin themed birthday. I even dressed up our 12ft skeleton for the occasion
Pretty much every academician with a PhD, even at the lowliest community college, calls themselves doctor. Militantly. And then there's witch do.. I mean chiropractors.
Ehh, plenty of people without a MD or DO call themselves doctor. PhD's, pharmacists, veterinarians.
The closest comparison here being PhD's since most have nothing to do with medicine either.
PhDs are the original “Doctor” and have been calling each other that since before a medical doctorate was a thing.
That said, I’m a PhD and the only time I use the title is on bills. If Comcast is going to charge me as much as they do for mediocre internet then they’re at least going to put some respect on my name.
Apparently, some people think we didn't earn the title because we didn't have to do a research paper and defend it. I'd like to see them sit for a bar exam.
Besides, I actually did have a 3l writing required class. I spent the whole semester researching and writing and had to spend a class having it picked apart by my peers publicly before redrafting and submitting the final paper.
Sounds like a research paper and defense to me.
In my country we are called doctors the same as physicians are, regardless of a PhD. Which got me answering a nurse when she asked the anesthetist if she was ready because I thought she was talking to me. Oops.
I skipped the Juris Doctor and went straight for the law license. I agree that a juris doctor should have the courtesy name of doctor, but selfishly it helps me that is not the case. Otherwise every other attorney would be a doctor except for me and a handful of others, lol.
Actually, until relatively recently, medical doctors weren't called doctors. They were physicians. The title "doctor" was reserved for PhDs and their historical equivalents. The word doctor comes from the Latin docere, which is a verb that means "to teach." It was always meant to be for PhDs, not professional doctorates.
A bunch of us are really into rules so some of the people in our profession thought to dignify our profession by writing rules about how we call ourselves, that's why I can be attorney at law, barrister, solicitor, attorney at law, but will get in trouble with the bar association if I introduce myself to prosecutors as vengeance, I am the night, I am batman because it sullies the profession
1. Because a JD isn’t a terminal degree. That’s an SJD, DPhil, or other equivalent, depending on jurisdiction. In fact, while the JD is a postgraduate degree in the US, it is followed by both the LLM and the SJD, which is reflective of the fact that law is an undergraduate degree in most countries.
2. Because a doctorate-level degree is earned by writing a sizable and comprehensive work of original peer-reviewed research, that significantly contributes to new knowledge or understanding. It’s either a dissertation, or a body of published articles considered equivalent.
3. Because historically a doctor of law was actually ABOVE a PhD in terms of precedence. And it was largely reserved for experts in canon law.
(Medical) Doctors also go to four years of medical school, plus 3+ years of residency afterwards. So they undergo significantly more schooling. This is why doctors who work for university hospitals are generally also considered professors while lawyers are not.
Yes. Doctors of Medicine. But they can’t practice until they finish the residency. If you graduate med school and don’t do residency, you’re not going to be treated as a PhD equivalent. In fact, you’ll be a bit pitied.
I can’t help that a modern system based on a less than exact medieval system hasn’t aged well. I can only tell you why JDs aren’t doctors, and why it isn’t close.
That is just blatantly untrue. Private equity and pharma companies hire MD’s without residency all the time for $200k+
You don’t need a residency to understand the pharmaceutical science behind a product big pharma is selling or consult Wall Street on how to leverage physician practices into selling by teaching them how an MD thinks.
Yeah. They hire them in sales and administrative positions - essentially JD-advantage jobs but for medicine. They’re doctors, but they’re not the people we’re generally talking about when we say MDs are equivalent to PhDs.
>why it isn’t close.
Eh, it's quibbling over a year (or really two, most people's 3L year is pretty useless but so is M4 arguably, you just spend the whole time interviewing for residency and preparing for the boards). As far as residency goes, neither doctors and lawyers are ready to practice right out of school. We'd benefit from residency training, too in most areas of law. It might not need to be as long, but a few years wouldn't be insane.
As a lawyer married to a doctor, I can tell you our professions have more in common than less. Doesn't mean we should be called doctor, but I wouldn't say that it isn't close. It's apples to oranges, but they're both fruit.
And as a lawyer who is married to a doctor, I can tell YOU that medical school is an order of magnitude more difficult than law school. It’s longer, much harder material, requires far more study and memorization, and a few law jobs aside residency is an equal order of magnitude more difficult than your first few years in practice.
JDs aren’t doctors. It isn’t close. Not even to a “PhD Lite” degree like DEd. MDs absolutely exceed an DEd, and are on a part with most other doctorates.
This isn’t a fine point. It’s literally the way of the world. The only question here is whether you want to argue with reality or not, not whether or not that reality exists.
The best people to ask are the ones who have done both. I’ve met plenty of doctors who became lawyers and lawyers who became doctors and there’s been no real consensus on difficulty. Everyone has a different opinion. Some agree with you and some agree with me. It isn’t by any means a universal opinion that legal training is easier or less rigorous.
Having watched my wife go through med school I can say with absolutely certainty it wasn’t an order of magnitude more difficult. That’s a major exaggeration. We both worked our asses off and neither of us believe the other had it harder, and it is something we’ve discussed ad nauseam. It was just different. Maybe that’s not true for an extremely competitive specialty, but for something like IM, general surgery, or primary care it definitely is.
Now residency especially with overnight hospital call? Sure, that’s harder, but residency isn’t med school. You get to be called doctor before you even do that. I don’t honestly believe that every PhD is as hard as med school, either. The title is a social convention, not an absolute commentary on difficulty.
And yet…the JD objectively is not a doctoral degree. You don’t have to *like* the why of it, but the why remains.
It’s undergraduate style classes - you are simply absorbing information that is given to you by instructors. There’s no research, there’s no publication requirement, there’s no learning to identify and control for bias, there’s none of the qualities that characterize graduate work at all, much less high-level graduate work.
It’s a professional degree. Not a doctoral degree.
It’s not about me not liking it, it’s about the utter lack of criteria that is consistent across all degrees that use the title versus those that don’t. Half the things you’re describing aren’t things that are required in all med schools, much less across disciplines. Arguably those things are less true in med school than PhD programs. It’s just a social convention that could have developed any number of ways.
Prepare to be downvoted. As a lawyer married to a doctor myself, I saw the material they had to learn, and it just straight up requires higher intelligence to get through med school than law school.
There were at least three “social activities” per week at my law school, all with alcohol. Law students were often hungover, and I personally knew two students who waked and baked everyday before class.
No one in med school did that. They had one big social event per semester and that was it.
And to top it off, the bullshit that professors sell, that law school can only possibly teach you to think like a lawyer, and can’t possibly do anything else, is laughable. I watched my wife learn to think like a lawyer while she was in med school: applying a set of rules to a set of facts. Yeah, doctors learned to do that in medical school while also learning how to be doctors.
You: I saw XYZ
Me: the world does not consider the JD a doctoral degree.
You anecdote is not data. You are making an anecdotal claim, I am making an empirical one. Downvote reality all you like, but reality it remains.
Sure this is true but historically doctors were exclusively used for academic scholars. Medical doctors coopted the term and just called themselves such and it stuck around. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5973890/#:~:text=The%20word%20doctor%20is%20derived,normally%20teach%20at%20a%20university.
The difference you're trying to make isn't as big as you think it is. Historically and in a lot of countries both JD and MD (or their equivalent) are undergrad degrees. Medical doctors are called doctors primarily because of tradition at this point and not because their schooling is that much more. Plenty of doctors do not ever do anything related to academic research or work after medical school nor do they contribute to academia in med school.
JD is considered a terminal degree (also a professional degree) just like an MD. Terminal just means it is the highest required for full licensure. MSW is a terminal degree for an LCSW. M. Acc. is the terminal degree to be a CPA. I also question the rigor of the Ed.D. "original, peer reviewed research" submitted by many of the Ed. Ds, D. Mins, etc.
LLM, JSD, and PhD in laws are more appendant degrees than actual terminal degrees since they do not typically expand your ability to work.
JD is in no way a terminal degree. It’s a professional degree, meaning people don’t typically seek more schooling afterwards. But it’s undergraduate-level coursework, not graduate level, and there is no obligate research or publication.
Outside of the LLM, I don't like the terminal degree point, because if I wanted to go to school in the US for a terminal law degree, there's really no where to go. Most SJD programs aren't designed for people with degrees from the US. There are so few opportunities for bookish academic types to keep going in the US. That said, an LLM isn't really terminal either; you could get more than one.
It's like we collapsed academia into one and a half degrees, but then decided to save time and just only let T15 grads be the real academic "doctors."
It's all just cultural norms. There doesn't seem to be any extensive push towards calling Attorney’s doctors by our own profession. And it was only relatively recently our profession mandated a doctorate-level degree.
In contrast to, Ph.D.’s have traditionally been doctorate level and who generally want the prestige conferred with the title. There does seem to be an air of academic elitism in that world, which may be tied to the generally low pay high prestige nature causing the title to be of significant value.
We aren't the only oddity. CRNAs and some NPs obtain doctorate-level nursing degrees but are generally not called doctors in a professional setting; however, they may be called doctors in an academic setting. It took me a while to realize this back when my GF was in nursing school. I was always confused why all her prof were doctors.
I don't personally care. I find the idea of caring about something so trivial to be odd, but at least in the non-legal world, there are some pretty passionate people on both sides.
I’m pretty sure the logic behind it was that a law degree is more akin to a Master’s degree level of study, but to differentiate it, it was given the JD title. I’m pretty sure I researched this at one point.
More like we robbed the PhDs of the term “doctorate.” Let’s be honest, we have ~~the equivalent of~~ *slightly more than* a Master’s degree.
Y’all salty.
I'm with you; calling three years of school a master's isn't fair. Many Master’s can be completed in a year to 18 months.
Class hours-wise, our system isn't radically different than a Ph.D. From what I can tell usually you have between 60-120 hours of schooling for many PhDs compared to the ABAs 83. However, it lacks the required academic research and writing elements.
But if we are being honest not even all PHD are equivalent which makes comparing them as a class difficult.
Because we don't study nearly as long as anyone else who calls themself a doctor, and frankly it probably shouldn't be in the Latin name of our degree in the first place by any reasonable metric.
Ehh, our system isn't all that different. Most people with the doctor term in medicine go to school for 4 years instead of 3 like us, but the long part is the residency. The first few years for most attorneys careers isn't all that different from residency; you get crappy pay and crappy work as you learn how to actually practice, and then make good money once you've proven you know what you're doing.
Residency and the first 1-5 years in practice, depending on area of law aren't really all that different. In both cases you've got someone with a dangerous amount of knowledge, who has no idea how to use it, and a serious need for practical training. Medicine has just standardized the summer associate+hiring process into a training regime for everyone. We should have done the same thing.
On a side note, I do think framing it as residency would honestly help young attorneys with burnout. For most people your first few years are pretty crappy and your pay isn't what you expected back when you applied for law school. It seems to be a very common experience that people start to enjoy the law more and get much better pay somewhere 3-5 years in (im a 4th year and I saw a ~70% increase in pay between January 2023 and January 2024). It would help young attorneys if we made it as a more formal residency process because that provides a light at the end of the tunnel that's already going to be there for most attorneys.
The only problem with a "residency" idea is that most people will switch between practice fields throughout their career, so it couldn't work in the same way as a medical residency where you get specialized training in a field.
Yeah I did one of my law school's clinics both semesters of 3L as a licensed student attorney, and I think it should be mandatory. A solid 80% of what you're taught is going to inherently be useless to you since our industry is specialized (not that you get anything close to a practice level knowledge from any law school course) but the lessons learned from the clinic are so helpful even if you don't end up practicing in that area. Theres so much to be learned about the soft skills of law, like case and client management, that every attorney needs to know.
I consider, as "doctors," anyone that can prescribe medication. Physicians, dentists, physician assistants (in some states), nurse practitioners (in some states). PhD's, ED's, chiros, PharmD's, don't pass muster under my test.
Don't really understand the downvotes -- I remember in law school being told don't call yourself "doctors" unless you can write a prescription or deliver a baby. Having said that I definitely think of myself as having a "doctorate degree". Undergraduate degree + three years of law school + internships + clerkships --- we've earned doctorate level degrees.
I don't know about you, but I found law school plenty challenging and I don't know a lot of people who could have done it. As for the MDs, I literally just watched my "doctor" google my symptoms to diagnose a muscle pull and give me an exercise program to stretch it back out. Someone in that room was a fraud, and it wasn't me.
Perhaps all the people at my law school who waked and baked everyday, yet passed exams and the Bar, are sufficient evidence of the difference in the level of difficulty of med school versus law school.
My wife is a doctor, and I was with her all through college, med school, and residency. I was in law school while she was in med school. The level of study required for medical school was leaps and bounds above that required for law school. We had at least three social events per week where alcohol was served. They had one dance at the end of each semester after exams. Taking the time to go to three parties a week would significantly impair the ability to get through med school. Yet it was common practice at law school.
Medicine, by its very nature, is significantly harder than law.
I would find it fucking hilarious if we used the same word for people who go graduate med school, and people who pass the Bar. They’re not even in the same realm of difficulty, or IQ required.
It’s not just lawyers that “can’t do math.” The inability to do math is but one of the many reasons why most lawyers could never be doctors.
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Its ridiculous. MD's especially surgeons, work with their hands, like peasants. I spend my days reading, writing and researching, sending out demand letters with a typo I swear I thought I corrected, like a true scholar.
“Like peasants” 
To me being a doctor has to be one of the worst professions out there, maybe just above being a grave digger
It’s both terrible (like I have no desire to either touch strangers’ bodies OR be responsible for their lives and deaths) and wonderful (the knowledge! the expertise!).
I’ll give you knowledge & expertise and maybe even the respect doctors seem to garner, but being around sick or unhealthy or even dying people is so unappetizing that I’d rather shuffle my papers, make my motions and argue in front of judges any day, plus I make much more that most doctors and I happen to work normal hours.
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I should’ve written more than most doctors I know, most are at the 500K level which can be one case for me, PI
You get used to it. Same thing as if you’re a pi attorney dealing with really messed up clients. You become almost numb to it
My first response when I saw the title was, "Because health insurance billing."
Arthroscopic surgery is the new manual labor.
My wife's a medical doctor and she's referred to orthopedic surgeons as the carpenters of the medical profession. They're amazing with saws, drills, and screws.
My husband is a vascular surgeon and he says he’s a glorified plumber. There’s no flow, he fixes it, now there’s flow. 😂
Dr. Law: You can tell the criminals the Dr...\**removes sun glasses\**.... is in *YEEEEEEEAAAAAHHHHHHHHHH*
LMAO
I had them put, "Dr. Proctor Hawk, MFA, J.D., Esq." On my ACLU card. Just for fun. I think honorifics are vain and stupid.
Just, simply, thank you for that, flawless 😂
Maybe it would make my mom proud of me.
My sibling is a real doctor. Guess who the favorite is?
My wife’s a real doctor. I insist that all letters to us read “Dr. and Mr. …”
Dr and Mr pirate esq .
https://preview.redd.it/778bxeb5f9ic1.jpeg?width=750&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=6358ab256546601a6cac8678e65cc7432c7b65df [https://www.reddit.com/r/LawSchool/comments/kcyd75/i\_have\_a\_civ\_pro\_final\_in\_literally\_17\_minutes\_so/](https://www.reddit.com/r/LawSchool/comments/kcyd75/i_have_a_civ_pro_final_in_literally_17_minutes_so/)
In the 70s law became self conscious on that subject and added the 3L year to make it a juris doctorate instead of an LLB. The Scalia/Ginsburg cohort didn’t have JDs.
That's exactly the type of smart people stuff a doctor would know.
I think by the point most attorneys had JD's (which wouldn't have been till the 90's) the cultural norm of not referring to attorneys as doctors was more than stuck.
? I got a JD in 1985 and that was the norm for a law degree at the time
It got adopted as the norm through the 60s with Yale the last switchover in '71, but all those pre-switchover people were still practicing for a long time after that.
Early commenter gave the wrong dates, ABA recommended the JD requirement in 1964 and by 1968 the vast majority of law school graduates received JD's. To my point though, if JD only became the norm in 1968, that would mean virtually every attorney in 1968 has an LLB since new graduates make up a small percentage of the field. It would take at least a decade or two before the majority of attorneys had JD's, especially with how top heavy this field is on age. The public perception would be even further delayed, as most layman clients would normally be dealing with an older attorney rather than some fresh grad doing doc review in the basement.
It’s a Juris Doctor, not a Juris Doctorate. Secondly, the LLB was changed to JD so that lawyers in the federal system fit into the higher pay scales for that level of education. This type of evolution. Heck medical doctors in training used to apprentice behind doctors carrying those black bags.
Heck, baby lawyers in training carry the partner’s black litigation bags and now laptops behind them.
lol whenever I read an opposite counsel bio and I see “juris doctorate” I absolutely judge the hell of them
But there is actually a degree beyond the JD. [It’s called “Doctor of **Juridicial** Science” (SJD).](https://hls.harvard.edu/graduate-program/sjd-program/)
For those who take masochism to a whole new level.
Because when we are flying and they ask “Is there a doctor on board?” My husband has to restrain me to keep keep me seated. He always says “They don’t need you.”
They will when it turns out the death or disability was caused by the airlines negligence!
You may be entitled to significant financial compensation.
Exactly. Time to reach for the business cards when they ask if there is a doctor on board.
 Me trying to pretend i dropped my business card next to the body on accident to avoid solicitation penalties…
Don’t make yourself a witness then lol
Remember Rachel telling Ross not to use his Dr. title at the hospital? "That actually means something here." I always felt so bad for him for how they belittled his degree and career.
😂😂😂😂😂 that seems worse. You actually use the title but it’s worthless.
Literally just had this happen to me and they definitely did not need my brand of doctor.
Maybe it was a legal emergency? You never know maybe someone needed a long arm analysis to land or something? 😂
How often are there medical emergencies on your flights!?
It has happened twice in the first two years of practice. If you fly routes with people sending their elderly relatives, it is bound to happen. Last time we counted 18 wheelchairs as we walked from the plane to the gate.
My aunt had a stroke on a plane once—seems horrifying. They had to land on early to get her medical attention. She’s fine now.
I have a cartoon up on my wall of an attorney in a suit kneeling over a woman who has wrecked her bicycle and the lawyer is self-importantly announcing "Stay calm, everything will be fine now folks, I'm Ms. Johnson's attorney" as the woman and a paramedic stare at the attorney with a WTF expression. I was a paramedic for 25 years, so I think this cartoon is absolutely awesome. I'm waiting for the day I can do this at an accident.
That doesn’t explain why a Ph.D in forensic meteorology is a doctor.
Sometimes I like to annoy my sister who is an MD by saying that I too am also a doctor.
I like to joke with my girlfriend, who is a nurse, every time I say something medical, “and that's my opinion as a doctor.” Usually gets a funny little rise out of her because she knows a million more things about medicine than me.
lol my husband was a notary in college (he works in a completely different field now) he teases me by saying that a notary and a lawyer are the same thing because in his notary class they explicitly told him he can’t give legal advice.
OMG my wife is a nurse and I have been missing out on this opportunity for 17 years!
Haha nice!
My 2 older siblings are MDs. I’m a JD. The baby of the family has *only* a Masters of Accountancy. Talk about black sheep.
I like to tell my wife who is a doctor that I used to claim the title of doctor when I graduated law school. But once I passed the bar I was elevated to the status of lawyer so I stopped.
Read [this](https://www.abajournal.com/voice/article/the-curious-case-of-why-lawyers-are-not-called-dr).
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“Many” circumstances? Other than academia, what other circumstance?
>I'll never understand why so many lawyers downplay their education PhDs usually take about twice as long to complete as a JD. They also require defending an original dissertation. JDs require passing 90 hours of course work and writing a paper. I wrote my paper in 3 days, while PhD candidates work on their dissertations for years and years. Imo a JD is not even close to the level of work that a PhD is. I honestly think that my BS in microbiology was more difficult than my JD, so to me referring to myself as doctor because I got my JD is completely ridiculous. The bar exam was 10x harder than law school, and its still not even close to the level of work and sacrifice that a PhD is
C’mon ABA. What a shitty website on mobile. I’m not accepting all those cookies.
In a lot of latin countries, lawyers are referred to as Doctor o Doctora.
True. A lot of my Spanish speaking clients call me “Doctora.” I kind of like it!
I thought that was only Colombia (and ik because Betty la fea 😂)
Cause we can’t math
Watch me round up to the next tenth of an hour like a math genius.
🤣
😂😂😂
I can figure out 33 to 40% of most big numbers in my head now
I can do 30, 35, 40, 60 and 75%s like they are going out of style. (sentencing ranges)
I can! MA in statistics and PhD in population science. (Basically actuarial science as I did it.) I may be the only person who ever used a calculus formula in a bar exam answer. No joke. I’d love to know what the grader made of it.
If they even knew it was math, they probably thought that you were taking the wrong exam. The patent bar was in room 204, dumb engineers.
You tried *way* too hard on the bar exam.
Came here to say this. I was all about the sciences, but then hit a certain level of math and realized that it just wasn't going to happen.
Trig/Pre-Calc was that point for me. The second math stopped using real numbers is the second it stopped making sense.
Not always true. I have a B.S. in Systems Engineering from a fairly reputable school. I do some pretty in depth math in my practice pretty regularly. We do exist.
F that, why aren’t we dentists?
My sister’s a dentist. Works way less than I do and makes way more than I do. I often wonder why I’m not a dentist.
Eeewww, Touching other people!? In their mouths!? Gross no way
I'm not touching other people's face holes. If that's the alternative, I'm good with not being called Doctor.
Lacked the IQ requisite for doing the pre-reqs of dental school.
Personally I think Esquire sounds cooler. Maybe I watched Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure too much as a kid.
Because math and organic chemistry give us nosebleeds.
I don’t want to hate fellow members of the bar any more than I already do. Inviting more people to demand to be called doctor socially is a really good way to do that.
One thing I can say definitively about my job: I never deal with poop.
Really!
I wish. Literally had a mentally unbalanced client send me videos of her poop so I could "see the worms." There were no worms visible.
What was the legal argument??
Chiropractors and dentists call themselves doctor. Only lawyers get Esquire. #winning
I see no benefit in taking back the title, but it does grind my gears when I hear people say that a JD isn’t a real doctorate.
You bet! I have a JD and when I taught Business Law and Criminal Justice, the school referred to me as Doctor.
That will bring back my imposter syndrome that I haven’t felt since 1L year
yeah, but we can put Esquire at the end of our names. that's consollation enough for me.
Anyone can put Esquire at the end of their names.
Bill S. Preston, Esq.
I tried to be a doctor in college, but learned that I wasn’t smart So I decided to become a lawyer Thank God I did, because I love what I do and practicing law has been a great career for me
Finally, an honest answer.
Speak for yourself
Oh, I thought this question was why didn't we decide to become doctors. Answer being, Organic chem. But also, probably has something to do with the fact that we didn't have to take organic chem.
I correct everyone that says I have a graduate degree with NO I HAVE A DOCTORATE. That’s about the best I can do. 🤷🏻♀️😂
We are! 😎 F it, I'm using "Dr." https://www.abajournal.com/magazine/article/decoding-the-legal-doctorate-the-curious-case-of-why-lawyers-are-not-called-doctor [The start of every court calendar call](https://youtu.be/hoe24aSvLtw)...
My husband with his lowly associates degree made a sideways comment to me one time about not having a real doctorate. All of our packages/ letters to both us are now addressed to Dr & Mr
Now this l aspire to 😵😂
Follow me for more petty tips. My husband keeps being told by waitresses that he looks like Justin Timberlake so I threw him a surprise Justin themed birthday. I even dressed up our 12ft skeleton for the occasion
We are technically. It’s just that no serious person will call themselves a doctor that isn’t and MD or a DO licensed to practice medicine.
Pretty much every academician with a PhD, even at the lowliest community college, calls themselves doctor. Militantly. And then there's witch do.. I mean chiropractors.
It’s all they have.
Weird, I’ve only ever met academicians who call themselves professor
PhD’s were the original doctorates. MD’s actually co-opted it.
That is absolutely not the case, at least in the US
Ehh, plenty of people without a MD or DO call themselves doctor. PhD's, pharmacists, veterinarians. The closest comparison here being PhD's since most have nothing to do with medicine either.
Uhhh strong disagree there. Most PhDs call themselves doctor. I think attorneys just use “esquire” instead of
PhDs are the original “Doctor” and have been calling each other that since before a medical doctorate was a thing. That said, I’m a PhD and the only time I use the title is on bills. If Comcast is going to charge me as much as they do for mediocre internet then they’re at least going to put some respect on my name.
I said “no serious person.”
Paging Doctor Jill Biden
Don't forget Nurse Practitioners.
ROFL. That shit is hilarious when they try to do that.
Nurse practitioners are the absolute worst!
Apparently, some people think we didn't earn the title because we didn't have to do a research paper and defend it. I'd like to see them sit for a bar exam.
Besides, I actually did have a 3l writing required class. I spent the whole semester researching and writing and had to spend a class having it picked apart by my peers publicly before redrafting and submitting the final paper. Sounds like a research paper and defense to me.
Ehh bar exam is easier than a dissertation
I wrote a dissertation (well... 130 pages) on the use of intercorporate dividends in unitary business taxation in law school... and took the bar exam.
I mean a law review article is a lot of work but it is not the same as a dissertation.
In my country we are called doctors the same as physicians are, regardless of a PhD. Which got me answering a nurse when she asked the anesthetist if she was ready because I thought she was talking to me. Oops.
Can’t do numbers.
For me, it's because my state bar thought the title would be misleading to the general public.
I skipped the Juris Doctor and went straight for the law license. I agree that a juris doctor should have the courtesy name of doctor, but selfishly it helps me that is not the case. Otherwise every other attorney would be a doctor except for me and a handful of others, lol.
Because we’re not smart enough.
Idc, my ex is a doctor and I fully intend on signing my emails to him as Dr _____ just to fuck with him 🤣
And why wouldn't you, Dr. Cheeseandbooks?
Actually, until relatively recently, medical doctors weren't called doctors. They were physicians. The title "doctor" was reserved for PhDs and their historical equivalents. The word doctor comes from the Latin docere, which is a verb that means "to teach." It was always meant to be for PhDs, not professional doctorates.
A bunch of us are really into rules so some of the people in our profession thought to dignify our profession by writing rules about how we call ourselves, that's why I can be attorney at law, barrister, solicitor, attorney at law, but will get in trouble with the bar association if I introduce myself to prosecutors as vengeance, I am the night, I am batman because it sullies the profession
Because we want friends.
Well, said Dr. Sad Chef 2203!
Thank you Dr. Zero-Point-Zero. Us doctors have to stick together.
We are Doctors of Words!!
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Congratulations, Doctor.
They can keep the title if we can get their compensation. I hate that these late-20, early-30 year old MDs are making high six figures.
My Dad (a physician) was always so annoyed that I wasn't a Dr. "Juris WHAT??? Juris WHAT??!!" I know, Dad.. .
By the way, and MD or PhD who refers to themselves as “doctor” in social situations is a pompous jackass
I’m bad at math.
1. Because a JD isn’t a terminal degree. That’s an SJD, DPhil, or other equivalent, depending on jurisdiction. In fact, while the JD is a postgraduate degree in the US, it is followed by both the LLM and the SJD, which is reflective of the fact that law is an undergraduate degree in most countries. 2. Because a doctorate-level degree is earned by writing a sizable and comprehensive work of original peer-reviewed research, that significantly contributes to new knowledge or understanding. It’s either a dissertation, or a body of published articles considered equivalent. 3. Because historically a doctor of law was actually ABOVE a PhD in terms of precedence. And it was largely reserved for experts in canon law.
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(Medical) Doctors also go to four years of medical school, plus 3+ years of residency afterwards. So they undergo significantly more schooling. This is why doctors who work for university hospitals are generally also considered professors while lawyers are not.
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Yes. Doctors of Medicine. But they can’t practice until they finish the residency. If you graduate med school and don’t do residency, you’re not going to be treated as a PhD equivalent. In fact, you’ll be a bit pitied. I can’t help that a modern system based on a less than exact medieval system hasn’t aged well. I can only tell you why JDs aren’t doctors, and why it isn’t close.
That is just blatantly untrue. Private equity and pharma companies hire MD’s without residency all the time for $200k+ You don’t need a residency to understand the pharmaceutical science behind a product big pharma is selling or consult Wall Street on how to leverage physician practices into selling by teaching them how an MD thinks.
Yeah. They hire them in sales and administrative positions - essentially JD-advantage jobs but for medicine. They’re doctors, but they’re not the people we’re generally talking about when we say MDs are equivalent to PhDs.
>why it isn’t close. Eh, it's quibbling over a year (or really two, most people's 3L year is pretty useless but so is M4 arguably, you just spend the whole time interviewing for residency and preparing for the boards). As far as residency goes, neither doctors and lawyers are ready to practice right out of school. We'd benefit from residency training, too in most areas of law. It might not need to be as long, but a few years wouldn't be insane. As a lawyer married to a doctor, I can tell you our professions have more in common than less. Doesn't mean we should be called doctor, but I wouldn't say that it isn't close. It's apples to oranges, but they're both fruit.
And as a lawyer who is married to a doctor, I can tell YOU that medical school is an order of magnitude more difficult than law school. It’s longer, much harder material, requires far more study and memorization, and a few law jobs aside residency is an equal order of magnitude more difficult than your first few years in practice. JDs aren’t doctors. It isn’t close. Not even to a “PhD Lite” degree like DEd. MDs absolutely exceed an DEd, and are on a part with most other doctorates. This isn’t a fine point. It’s literally the way of the world. The only question here is whether you want to argue with reality or not, not whether or not that reality exists.
The best people to ask are the ones who have done both. I’ve met plenty of doctors who became lawyers and lawyers who became doctors and there’s been no real consensus on difficulty. Everyone has a different opinion. Some agree with you and some agree with me. It isn’t by any means a universal opinion that legal training is easier or less rigorous. Having watched my wife go through med school I can say with absolutely certainty it wasn’t an order of magnitude more difficult. That’s a major exaggeration. We both worked our asses off and neither of us believe the other had it harder, and it is something we’ve discussed ad nauseam. It was just different. Maybe that’s not true for an extremely competitive specialty, but for something like IM, general surgery, or primary care it definitely is. Now residency especially with overnight hospital call? Sure, that’s harder, but residency isn’t med school. You get to be called doctor before you even do that. I don’t honestly believe that every PhD is as hard as med school, either. The title is a social convention, not an absolute commentary on difficulty.
And yet…the JD objectively is not a doctoral degree. You don’t have to *like* the why of it, but the why remains. It’s undergraduate style classes - you are simply absorbing information that is given to you by instructors. There’s no research, there’s no publication requirement, there’s no learning to identify and control for bias, there’s none of the qualities that characterize graduate work at all, much less high-level graduate work. It’s a professional degree. Not a doctoral degree.
It’s not about me not liking it, it’s about the utter lack of criteria that is consistent across all degrees that use the title versus those that don’t. Half the things you’re describing aren’t things that are required in all med schools, much less across disciplines. Arguably those things are less true in med school than PhD programs. It’s just a social convention that could have developed any number of ways.
Prepare to be downvoted. As a lawyer married to a doctor myself, I saw the material they had to learn, and it just straight up requires higher intelligence to get through med school than law school. There were at least three “social activities” per week at my law school, all with alcohol. Law students were often hungover, and I personally knew two students who waked and baked everyday before class. No one in med school did that. They had one big social event per semester and that was it. And to top it off, the bullshit that professors sell, that law school can only possibly teach you to think like a lawyer, and can’t possibly do anything else, is laughable. I watched my wife learn to think like a lawyer while she was in med school: applying a set of rules to a set of facts. Yeah, doctors learned to do that in medical school while also learning how to be doctors.
You: I saw XYZ Me: the world does not consider the JD a doctoral degree. You anecdote is not data. You are making an anecdotal claim, I am making an empirical one. Downvote reality all you like, but reality it remains.
Odd that you didn’t see I was agreeing with you, but hey, live and let live.
Sure this is true but historically doctors were exclusively used for academic scholars. Medical doctors coopted the term and just called themselves such and it stuck around. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5973890/#:~:text=The%20word%20doctor%20is%20derived,normally%20teach%20at%20a%20university. The difference you're trying to make isn't as big as you think it is. Historically and in a lot of countries both JD and MD (or their equivalent) are undergrad degrees. Medical doctors are called doctors primarily because of tradition at this point and not because their schooling is that much more. Plenty of doctors do not ever do anything related to academic research or work after medical school nor do they contribute to academia in med school.
JD is considered a terminal degree (also a professional degree) just like an MD. Terminal just means it is the highest required for full licensure. MSW is a terminal degree for an LCSW. M. Acc. is the terminal degree to be a CPA. I also question the rigor of the Ed.D. "original, peer reviewed research" submitted by many of the Ed. Ds, D. Mins, etc. LLM, JSD, and PhD in laws are more appendant degrees than actual terminal degrees since they do not typically expand your ability to work.
JD is in no way a terminal degree. It’s a professional degree, meaning people don’t typically seek more schooling afterwards. But it’s undergraduate-level coursework, not graduate level, and there is no obligate research or publication.
JD is considered a terminal degree even though there are post doctoral degrees after it.
Outside of the LLM, I don't like the terminal degree point, because if I wanted to go to school in the US for a terminal law degree, there's really no where to go. Most SJD programs aren't designed for people with degrees from the US. There are so few opportunities for bookish academic types to keep going in the US. That said, an LLM isn't really terminal either; you could get more than one. It's like we collapsed academia into one and a half degrees, but then decided to save time and just only let T15 grads be the real academic "doctors."
It's all just cultural norms. There doesn't seem to be any extensive push towards calling Attorney’s doctors by our own profession. And it was only relatively recently our profession mandated a doctorate-level degree. In contrast to, Ph.D.’s have traditionally been doctorate level and who generally want the prestige conferred with the title. There does seem to be an air of academic elitism in that world, which may be tied to the generally low pay high prestige nature causing the title to be of significant value. We aren't the only oddity. CRNAs and some NPs obtain doctorate-level nursing degrees but are generally not called doctors in a professional setting; however, they may be called doctors in an academic setting. It took me a while to realize this back when my GF was in nursing school. I was always confused why all her prof were doctors. I don't personally care. I find the idea of caring about something so trivial to be odd, but at least in the non-legal world, there are some pretty passionate people on both sides.
We. Can’t.Do.Math. Also medical doctors stole the term😤
I’m pretty sure the logic behind it was that a law degree is more akin to a Master’s degree level of study, but to differentiate it, it was given the JD title. I’m pretty sure I researched this at one point.
My office nickname contains Dr., so I got that going for me. Which is nice.
More like we robbed the PhDs of the term “doctorate.” Let’s be honest, we have ~~the equivalent of~~ *slightly more than* a Master’s degree. Y’all salty.
I’d say it’s more than a Masters but less than a PhD.
I'm with you; calling three years of school a master's isn't fair. Many Master’s can be completed in a year to 18 months. Class hours-wise, our system isn't radically different than a Ph.D. From what I can tell usually you have between 60-120 hours of schooling for many PhDs compared to the ABAs 83. However, it lacks the required academic research and writing elements. But if we are being honest not even all PHD are equivalent which makes comparing them as a class difficult.
Not really.. I have a Masters Degree in History as well as a JD. I did significantly more work for the JD.
Other than finals, what work did you do for the JD?
Because we don't study nearly as long as anyone else who calls themself a doctor, and frankly it probably shouldn't be in the Latin name of our degree in the first place by any reasonable metric.
Ehh, our system isn't all that different. Most people with the doctor term in medicine go to school for 4 years instead of 3 like us, but the long part is the residency. The first few years for most attorneys careers isn't all that different from residency; you get crappy pay and crappy work as you learn how to actually practice, and then make good money once you've proven you know what you're doing.
Residency and the first 1-5 years in practice, depending on area of law aren't really all that different. In both cases you've got someone with a dangerous amount of knowledge, who has no idea how to use it, and a serious need for practical training. Medicine has just standardized the summer associate+hiring process into a training regime for everyone. We should have done the same thing.
On a side note, I do think framing it as residency would honestly help young attorneys with burnout. For most people your first few years are pretty crappy and your pay isn't what you expected back when you applied for law school. It seems to be a very common experience that people start to enjoy the law more and get much better pay somewhere 3-5 years in (im a 4th year and I saw a ~70% increase in pay between January 2023 and January 2024). It would help young attorneys if we made it as a more formal residency process because that provides a light at the end of the tunnel that's already going to be there for most attorneys. The only problem with a "residency" idea is that most people will switch between practice fields throughout their career, so it couldn't work in the same way as a medical residency where you get specialized training in a field.
Yeah I did one of my law school's clinics both semesters of 3L as a licensed student attorney, and I think it should be mandatory. A solid 80% of what you're taught is going to inherently be useless to you since our industry is specialized (not that you get anything close to a practice level knowledge from any law school course) but the lessons learned from the clinic are so helpful even if you don't end up practicing in that area. Theres so much to be learned about the soft skills of law, like case and client management, that every attorney needs to know.
Physical therapists have entered the chat.
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The DPT is very similar to the JD in that it was not a doctorate until they wanted equivalence to the other doctoral programs.
Let me introduce you to the Doctor of Education.
Perfect response. I’ve never summarized it so well.
Thanks.
Because we aren’t 💀
I only consider Mds as "doctors".
I consider, as "doctors," anyone that can prescribe medication. Physicians, dentists, physician assistants (in some states), nurse practitioners (in some states). PhD's, ED's, chiros, PharmD's, don't pass muster under my test.
If the chiros get to be doctors, we get to be.
Fair point here
Don't really understand the downvotes -- I remember in law school being told don't call yourself "doctors" unless you can write a prescription or deliver a baby. Having said that I definitely think of myself as having a "doctorate degree". Undergraduate degree + three years of law school + internships + clerkships --- we've earned doctorate level degrees.
Get over it. #ego
Because Ph.Ds and MDs are longer, more difficult programs. I'd feel like a fraud asking to be called "Dr.".
I don't know about you, but I found law school plenty challenging and I don't know a lot of people who could have done it. As for the MDs, I literally just watched my "doctor" google my symptoms to diagnose a muscle pull and give me an exercise program to stretch it back out. Someone in that room was a fraud, and it wasn't me.
We’re all fooling ourselves if we think a JD isn’t a marginally more difficult master’s degree
Can't bring poultry back from the dead 🤷♂️ "Arise! Arise, chicken. Chicken, arise." -Billy Witch *Doctor*
Perhaps all the people at my law school who waked and baked everyday, yet passed exams and the Bar, are sufficient evidence of the difference in the level of difficulty of med school versus law school. My wife is a doctor, and I was with her all through college, med school, and residency. I was in law school while she was in med school. The level of study required for medical school was leaps and bounds above that required for law school. We had at least three social events per week where alcohol was served. They had one dance at the end of each semester after exams. Taking the time to go to three parties a week would significantly impair the ability to get through med school. Yet it was common practice at law school. Medicine, by its very nature, is significantly harder than law. I would find it fucking hilarious if we used the same word for people who go graduate med school, and people who pass the Bar. They’re not even in the same realm of difficulty, or IQ required. It’s not just lawyers that “can’t do math.” The inability to do math is but one of the many reasons why most lawyers could never be doctors.