Thoughts on a dual JD/MA program?

[Jean-Ralphio Saperstein]

Any one have tips / advice / experience they can share for someone interested in pursuing a JD/MA dual degree? I'm particularly interested in the MA in Criminology offered by UofT.

[johnny.rahmbo]

I understand that the JD/MA (Crim) doesn't add any additional length to your degree so you'd obtain both in 3 years which is great. Both also top notch programs for the disciplines. 

I think the utility depends on what type of law you see yourself practicing. I can say that an MA in Crim for a Bay st firm would likely be useless and nothing more than two extra letters behind your name. However an MA in Econ is attractive, particularly for Competition groups in Bay st firms. That being said, if you want to go into criminal law/public policy roles in the future then i think the MA is worth it. So it does, in my opinion, boil down to what type of law you see yourself in. Give this some thought and i think the answer as to whether you want to apply/enrol will come naturally. 

The MA for Crim at U of T is likely the best program of its type so it will be competitive but if you have grades to get into the JD then i cant see any reason why you wouldnt be accepted into the MA - especially if you have a Crim background. 

[CleanHands]

19 minutes ago, johnny.rahmbo said:

That being said, if you want to go into criminal law/public policy roles in the future then i think the MA is worth it. So it does, in my opinion, boil down to what type of law you see yourself in. Give this some thought and i think the answer as to whether you want to apply/enrol will come naturally. 

Wrong. Terrible post. At least in terms of criminal law (I don't know much about public policy jobs), an MA in criminology is literally worthless.

It won't help you get hired with the Crown, where hiring in most provinces and with the feds involve tests of substantive criminal law knowledge and when that's not the case experience/interest in criminal law demonstrated through law school alone will do it.

It won't help you get hired in criminal defence, as they will value practical experience over it. Then most criminal defence lawyers go solo or end up partners in small firms, and having an MA in criminology won't bring in clients and thus won't add value.

Even as a matter of "showing interest" or of developing relevant knowledge, there is a world of difference between the academic/sociological study of crime and deviant behaviour, and actually sitting down and talking to people who are immersed in those lifestyles, and being exposed to what comes with that in real life practice.

I can't imagine anyone who practices criminal law or hires people in the criminal law field viewing an MA in criminology as any sort of meaningful asset, and I work with and interact with criminal lawyers every day. And keep in mind that this is a subculture people are exposed to and learn about by virtue of working in criminal law, to a much deeper extent than through academic study. So it doesn't provide much in the way of unique insights. If one wanted an additional degree specifically for the purpose of adding value to a criminal law career, they'd likely be better served by something like a science degree that would help them understand forensic evidence better (but really nothing beyond the JD is necessary to get hired in criminal law and become a great criminal lawyer).

The only reason for the OP to obtain the MA in criminology should be out of personal interest, which is fine if that's sufficient for them (and I don't mean to disparage that, I just don't want its value to a criminal law career overstated).

Edited November 19, 2021 by CleanHands

[Deadpool]

The JD/MPP or JD/MGA option at U of T is far superior and will actually help you for jobs with the municipal and provincial governments. Though, they are more useful for policy rather than legal positions. The JD/MA in criminology has very little use in the legal field. The JD/MA in economics can be useful for taxation and competition law fields. The JD/MBA is useful for corporate positions. The JD/MSW can be beneficial if you want to work with vulnerable populations. 

[Jean-Ralphio Saperstein]

I should have prefaced this post with my interest in pursuing academia, and wanting to keep that door open while getting a JD. maybe I'll change my mind, but I've been interested in pursuing a PhD and perhaps an SJD

[CleanHands]

2 minutes ago, Dee said:

I should have prefaced this post with my interest in pursuing academia, and wanting to keep that door open while getting a JD. maybe I'll change my mind, but I've been interested in pursuing a PhD and perhaps an SJD

I'd generally advise everyone not to go into a JD program with the intentions of pursuing academia (and not to consider that a potential career option unless and until they have achieved top tier JD grades). Nearly every legal academic was a JD medalist (or close to it), SCC clerk, HYS or Oxbridge grad degree holder, etc.

And if you want to be a criminology academic, you don't need a JD.

[Deadpool]

In that case, you should just do an LLM after your JD - preferably internationally at Oxbridge or a top US school if you have the grades. You should also do an appellate/SCC clerkship if you have the grades. If you want to do your PhD in a specialized field, then do a master's degree in that field. I don't think criminology as a discipline is very helpful if you want to do your PhD or SJD, as it is quite a specialized, niche field and not many schools offer it to begin with. 

While you need to be at least an above average law student to realistically pursue the SJD - legal academic route, a PhD program would not have the same requirements. However, a law degree is an unnecessary investment if you are leaning more towards academia over practicing as a lawyer. 

[johnny.rahmbo]

43 minutes ago, CleanHands said:

Wrong. Terrible post. At least in terms of criminal law (I don't know much about public policy jobs), an MA in criminology is literally worthless.

LOL - very passionate. 

[Ben]

24 minutes ago, CleanHands said:

I'd generally advise everyone not to go into a JD program with the intentions of pursuing academia (and not to consider that a potential career option unless and until they have achieved top tier JD grades). Nearly every legal academic was a JD medalist (or close to it), SCC clerk, HYS or Oxbridge grad degree holder, etc.

And if you want to be a criminology academic, you don't need a JD.

If you’re also open to practicing law should it not work out, getting a JD is probably the smartest path to non-STEM academia. “Lawyer” is a significantly better backup plan than most philosophy PhD students have (for example). If you can’t pull the JD grades for appellate clerkships, you’re probably not someone who has a legitimate shot at the kind of PhD programs that place their students well in the academic job market (to the extent that any do, lol). Plus, although I don’t pay super close attention, I get the sense that there are more jobs in legal academia than in the academic humanities.
 

The only people who should take your advice are people who aren’t willing to practice law should academia not work out for them. 

[Rashabon]

16 minutes ago, johnny.rahmbo said:

LOL - very passionate. 

I appreciate you want to help but you're a law student with no experience. Your reckons shouldn't be posted as advice to other law students or potential law students on things you have no experience or background in.

The best advice I can give to anyone on this forum is to stay in your lane. There's a reason you don't see me advising on how to be a criminal lawyer. You shouldn't either.

[Deadpool]

13 minutes ago, Ben said:

If you’re also open to practicing law should it not work out, getting a JD is probably the smartest path to non-STEM academia. “Lawyer” is a significantly better backup plan than most philosophy PhD students have (for example). If you can’t pull the JD grades for appellate clerkships, you’re probably not someone who has a legitimate shot at the kind of PhD programs that place their students well in the academic job market (to the extent that any do, lol). Plus, although I don’t pay super close attention, I get the sense that there are more jobs in legal academia than in the academic humanities.
 

The only people who should take your advice are people who aren’t willing to practice law should academia not work out for them. 

Getting appellate and SCC clerkships is more difficult than getting into a good PhD program. You need around an A average in law school to be competitive for appellate and SCC clerkships. Most people going into law school were high performers to begin with in their undergraduate and master's programs. You can get into a decent PhD program with a B/B+ average in undergrad. I have seen a lot of mediocre students go on to do their PhDs and enter academia and research careers. A law degree and bar exams will take 3-4 years to complete. It will put you in tens of thousands of dollars in debt. Then you will spend more time and money investing in an LLM, SJD, PhD, etc. to enter a career path you could have done right out of undergraduate studies. Some law professors do not have law degrees either and are not lawyers, so it is not a requirement to work in legal academia. It just does not seem like a practical path if your primary interest is in academia to begin with. If you are leaning towards practicing law, and want the PhD as a potential option in the future, then you can consider it when the time comes, but you should first decide whether you want to practice law. 

[BlockedQuebecois]

13 minutes ago, Ben said:

If you can’t pull the JD grades for appellate clerkships, you’re probably not someone who has a legitimate shot at the kind of PhD programs that place their students well in the academic job market (to the extent that any do, lol).

This is an atrociously bad take. Law school grading doesn't favour people who are academically inclined. I went to law school with a bunch of people who would be much, much better PhD students than me. I got better grades than all of them. 

I was also going to address the rest of your post, but @Deadpool beat me to it and their post is better (and kinder) than mine would have been, so I endorse it instead. 

[johnny.rahmbo]

43 minutes ago, Rashabon said:

I appreciate you want to help but you're a law student with no experience. Your reckons shouldn't be posted as advice to other law students or potential law students on things you have no experience or background in.

The best advice I can give to anyone on this forum is to stay in your lane. There's a reason you don't see me advising on how to be a criminal lawyer. You shouldn't either.

Fair enough - as someone who once explored the potential route of OP (re JD/MA) i thought i would give my two cents based on what i was told by those who advised me once upon a time (i.e., undergraduate Professors and administrators). I also literally said the exact same thing as Deadpool regarding a JD/MA (Econ). So clearly i'm not so disconnected that my perspective is useless. I nevertheless understand where you're coming from. 

[Ben]

1 hour ago, Deadpool said:

Getting appellate and SCC clerkships is more difficult than getting into a good PhD program. You need around an A average in law school to be competitive for appellate and SCC clerkships. Most people going into law school were high performers to begin with in their undergraduate and master's programs. You can get into a decent PhD program with a B/B+ average in undergrad. I have seen a lot of mediocre students go on to do their PhDs and enter academia and research careers. A law degree and bar exams will take 3-4 years to complete. It will put you in tens of thousands of dollars in debt. Then you will spend more time and money investing in an LLM, SJD, PhD, etc. to enter a career path you could have done right out of undergraduate studies. Some law professors do not have law degrees either and are not lawyers, so it is not a requirement to work in legal academia. It just does not seem like a practical path if your primary interest is in academia to begin with. If you are leaning towards practicing law, and want the PhD as a potential option in the future, then you can consider it when the time comes, but you should first decide whether you want to practice law. 

Do you have any experience in graduate studies or are you just making some educated guesses based on people you know? In areas sufficiently adjacent to law that it might make sense to consider them as alternatives to legal academia, there are no "decent" PhD programs you can get into with a B average in undergrad. You would be insane to go to any program that would accept you with those grades, funded or not. Frankly, I'm not aware of any that fit that description. The only schools that reliably place their students in tenure-track academic positions (which are the only PhD programs worth being called "good," and the only ones worth going to unless you're independently wealthy) in the fields relevant to this discussion are incredibly difficult to get into. It might be worth perusing the Grad Cafe's admission results threads to get a sense of the credentials held by admits to schools like these. I have no idea how to parse the question of whether it's more difficult to do that than to get an appellate clerkship, but someone for whom an appellate clerkship is not even a possibility probably doesn't have the reading and writing chops to do it.

Regardless, OP described an interest in pursuing academia and "keep[ing ]that door open," which I took to mean that they would be happy to pursue law if academia didn't work out, not that they were looking to be a professor or nothing. As I said in the post you quoted, someone who is not willing to practice law as an alternative to academia definitely shouldn't get a JD to pursue their academic interests. The view that law is a good way to keep the door to academia open, provided you're willing to practice, is extremely common among law professors. It's so well known that professors in adjacent fields will recommend it to students interested in academia, given how bleak the job prospects in those fields are. 

Law professors who don't have law degrees are the exception, not the rule. The standard in legal academia these days is to get a JD and some kind of doctorate. A quick glance at the junior professors at any Canadian law school will confirm that for you. 

1 hour ago, BlockedQuebecois said:

This is an atrociously bad take. Law school grading doesn't favour people who are academically inclined. I went to law school with a bunch of people who would be much, much better PhD students than me. I got better grades than all of them. 

I was also going to address the rest of your post, but @Deadpool beat me to it and their post is better (and kinder) than mine would have been, so I endorse it instead. 

I hope the irony of liking @Rashabon's post and then explaining that I'm wrong because you suspect some of your classmates would make better doctoral students than you would isn't totally lost on you. Also, thank you for sparing me your less kind words. You're very magnanimous.

I am pretty reluctant to dox myself here with details, but speaking from experience with both application processes, the requirements to succeed in them, and colleagues who have done both: I have a very hard time imagining a person who has the reading, writing, and research chops to get into a strong PhD program in a law-adjacent field but not to get the JD grades needed to at least be competitive for an appellate clerkship. 

Both of these posts read like they were made by lawyers who have no experience in academia, no grasp on what kind of doctoral program you need to attend to have any shot at a job worth having in the English-speaking world, and no idea how selective the admissions processes for those programs are. If that's not the case, I guess I apologize, but I really can't make sense of the view that there are decent PhD programs that you can get into with a B average. 

@Dee, I am happy to share my experiences deciding between these paths and and why I ultimately settled on a JD that I view as keeping the door open, if you want to PM me. I would also encourage you to talk to your professors about this, and maybe reach out to relatively junior faculty at Canadian schools (just because they'll have gone through this more recently). Academics are nice people and the process is a real gauntlet. You'll find someone willing to talk to you for sure. 

Edited November 19, 2021 by Ben

[BlockedQuebecois]

10 minutes ago, Ben said:

I have a very hard time imagining a person who has the reading, writing, and research chops to get into a strong PhD program in a law-adjacent field but not to get the JD grades needed to at least be competitive for an appellate clerkship. 

There are literally people in law school with PhDs from good programs who fail to get the JD grades needed to compete for appellate clerkships. That's largely because you don't need reading, writing, or research chops to do well in law school, and those skills are honestly of pretty limited utility for law school exams. 

Edited November 19, 2021 by BlockedQuebecois

[Ben]

3 minutes ago, BlockedQuebecois said:

There are literally people in law school with PhDs from good programs who fail to get the JD grades needed to compete for appellate clerkships. That's largely because you don't need reading, writing, or research chops to do well in law school, and those skills are honestly of pretty limited utility for law school exams. 

First, without wanting to impugn the credentials of people with PhDs who don't have the grades you're talking about, I suspect we're talking about programs of different quality when I say "a strong PhD program" and you say "PhDs from good programs." 

Second, the point I'm trying to make is not "you are guaranteed to be able to get an appellate clerkship if you can get into good PhD programs." It's "if the need for an appellate clerkship to succeed in legal academia strikes you as a strong deterrent and a possibility ruled out ex ante, you probably don't have the chops for a strong PhD program." I would be curious to meet a person with experience in both fields who disagrees with that. 

[Deadpool]

@Ben I do have experience with graduate studies and am considering doing a PhD for personal interest and because I think there is value to having it for my career goals.
I think we need to clarify what you mean by strong PhD programs. And in what fields specifically. There are people that get PhDs from York in the humanities field and teach at Osgoode; and these PhD programs are not particularly difficult to get into, last time I checked. When you talk about strong PhD programs, are you referring to those being offered at schools like Oxbridge, ivy league, etc., or ones at Canadian schools. Some programs like psychology are really competitive, while others like philosophy or political science are not. 

I was nowhere near appellate or SCC clerkship levels in law school. I have been told by a number of ivy league schools and Oxbridge that I can get into some of their top graduate programs because of my strong undergraduate GPA and specialized practice experience. However, I am not competitive for LLM and SJD programs at these same schools. I am in touch with professors at these schools who have encouraged me to apply to their PhD programs. According to them, I have a "very strong profile". Honestly, I think you are overestimating how difficult it is to get into top PhD programs compared to securing appellate and SCC clerkships. Performing at the top of your class in law school takes very different skills than it does to perform well in academia.

[Ben]

@Deadpool my starting assumption here is that someone who's interested in legal academia probably isn't considering much outside of the humanities. I was thinking of fields that are "law-adjacent," like philosophy, political theory, and economics. I don't see a lot of legal academics whose doctorates are in fields besides law and those three, and actually, I can't think of anyone off the top of my head on faculty at a Canadian law school whose only graduate work is in economics. 

By "strong PhD programs," I mean programs that have strong placement records in the academic job market. Anyone in those fields who is being honest with their students would acknowledge that not a lot of schools satisfy that description. So yeah, I am referring to schools like Oxbridge, the Ivies, the strong west coast schools, and some that are none of the above but are still excellent (think NYU for philosophy, for example). 

I quickly flipped through the people who look to be Osgoode's most junior faculty. I don't have time to go through everyone but I didn't notice a single person who doesn't have a law degree. Almost all of them have doctorates, either PhDs or SJDs, from famously strong schools. 

I don't know what field you're referring to when you say that you've been told you have a strong chance at Ivy League/Oxbridge graduate programs. I would very respectfully say that I have been told the same thing by professors at schools like those and was never admitted at any. Profs aren't always in touch with the realities that adcoms deal with. Even if you are a shoo-in at one of those schools, that doesn't take away from the broader point I am trying to make: if appellate clerkship-level grades strike you as ex ante unattainable, you are probably not a legitimate candidate for a spot in (for example) Michigan or Oxford's doctoral programs in philosophy or Columbia's in political theory.

I think you are underestimating how hard it is to get into top PhD programs in fields like these. Again, I really encourage you to go check out Grad Cafe threads from past February-April admission seasons. I don't think I'm exaggerating when I say I would guess the median GPA at most of these programs is a 3.9-3.95 on a 4.0 scale, with outstanding GRE scores (admittedly that test is a joke) and often equally outstanding performances in Master's programs, not to mention some semblance of a research proposal that was enough to impress people on faculty at these schools. 

[BlockedQuebecois]

12 minutes ago, Ben said:

I don't think I'm exaggerating when I say I would guess the median GPA at most of these programs is a 3.9-3.95 on a 4.0 scale, with outstanding GRE scores (admittedly that test is a joke)

Maybe I'm misunderstanding you here, but you're not seriously suggesting it's harder to get a 3.9 GPA in undergrad and a great GRE score than it is to get the undergrad grades and LSAT necessary to get into a top Canadian law school and then finish in the top 5% of your law school class and get an appellate clerkship, are you? 

I found law school and the LSAT remarkably easy, and I am quite vocal about that, but even I wouldn't say it's easier to get into law school, finish in the top 5% of your law school class, and secure one of a few dozen jobs than it is to do well in undergrad and ace the GRE.

[Jean-Ralphio Saperstein]

2 hours ago, Ben said:

Do you have any experience in graduate studies or are you just making some educated guesses based on people you know? In areas sufficiently adjacent to law that it might make sense to consider them as alternatives to legal academia, there are no "decent" PhD programs you can get into with a B average in undergrad. You would be insane to go to any program that would accept you with those grades, funded or not. Frankly, I'm not aware of any that fit that description. The only schools that reliably place their students in tenure-track academic positions (which are the only PhD programs worth being called "good," and the only ones worth going to unless you're independently wealthy) in the fields relevant to this discussion are incredibly difficult to get into. It might be worth perusing the Grad Cafe's admission results threads to get a sense of the credentials held by admits to schools like these. I have no idea how to parse the question of whether it's more difficult to do that than to get an appellate clerkship, but someone for whom an appellate clerkship is not even a possibility probably doesn't have the reading and writing chops to do it.

Regardless, OP described an interest in pursuing academia and "keep[ing ]that door open," which I took to mean that they would be happy to pursue law if academia didn't work out, not that they were looking to be a professor or nothing. As I said in the post you quoted, someone who is not willing to practice law as an alternative to academia definitely shouldn't get a JD to pursue their academic interests. The view that law is a good way to keep the door to academia open, provided you're willing to practice, is extremely common among law professors. It's so well known that professors in adjacent fields will recommend it to students interested in academia, given how bleak the job prospects in those fields are. 

Law professors who don't have law degrees are the exception, not the rule. The standard in legal academia these days is to get a JD and some kind of doctorate. A quick glance at the junior professors at any Canadian law school will confirm that for you. 

I hope the irony of liking @Rashabon's post and then explaining that I'm wrong because you suspect some of your classmates would make better doctoral students than you would isn't totally lost on you. Also, thank you for sparing me your less kind words. You're very magnanimous.

I am pretty reluctant to dox myself here with details, but speaking from experience with both application processes, the requirements to succeed in them, and colleagues who have done both: I have a very hard time imagining a person who has the reading, writing, and research chops to get into a strong PhD program in a law-adjacent field but not to get the JD grades needed to at least be competitive for an appellate clerkship. 

Both of these posts read like they were made by lawyers who have no experience in academia, no grasp on what kind of doctoral program you need to attend to have any shot at a job worth having in the English-speaking world, and no idea how selective the admissions processes for those programs are. If that's not the case, I guess I apologize, but I really can't make sense of the view that there are decent PhD programs that you can get into with a B average. 

@Dee, I am happy to share my experiences deciding between these paths and and why I ultimately settled on a JD that I view as keeping the door open, if you want to PM me. I would also encourage you to talk to your professors about this, and maybe reach out to relatively junior faculty at Canadian schools (just because they'll have gone through this more recently). Academics are nice people and the process is a real gauntlet. You'll find someone willing to talk to you for sure. 

love you king

[Ben]

Just now, BlockedQuebecois said:

Maybe I'm misunderstanding you here, but you're not seriously suggesting it's harder to get a 3.9 GPA in undergrad and a great GRE score than it is to get the undergrad grades and LSAT necessary to get into a top Canadian law school and then finish in the top 5% of your law school class and get an appellate clerkship, are you? 

I found law school and the LSAT remarkably easy, and I am quite vocal about that, but even I wouldn't say it's easier to get into law school, finish in the top 5% of your law school class, and secure one of a few dozen jobs than it is to do well in undergrad and ace the GRE.

No, I'm not seriously suggesting that, lol. Every single person who's a serious candidate for programs like these has grades like that. They are basically differentiated by their writing sample (which is the most important part of any PhD application, at least in these fields) and their letters of reference (which are a close second). My point, again, is that a person who thinks they have no shot at an appellate clerkship is probably not going to be capable of producing a writing sample that would get them into one of these programs, nor the kind of written work that would get them the kind of endorsement they need from the kind of people whose endorsements matter to these programs.

[BlockedQuebecois]

@Ben I think the reason you are getting so much pushback is because your response to @Deadpool read very much as though you were disagreeing with their opening sentences, which were: 

Quote

Getting appellate and SCC clerkships is more difficult than getting into a good PhD program. You need around an A average in law school to be competitive for appellate and SCC clerkships. Most people going into law school were high performers to begin with in their undergraduate and master's programs.

And the reason I disagreed with you is because your original stance, at least to me, read as though you believe anybody who can get into a strong PhD program would get an appellate clerkship if they went to law school. Here is your first post on the subject, for context: 

Quote

If you can’t pull the JD grades for appellate clerkships, you’re probably not someone who has a legitimate shot at the kind of PhD programs that place their students well in the academic job market

The reason I stopped responding to you was because you partially walked that back in your first reply (to "at least be competitive for an appellate clerkship") and then appeared to completely walk that back to, essentially, "if you don't have the strong academic track record that suggests you have a good shot at getting top 5% grades and an appellate clerkship, you likely wouldn't get into a strong PhD program" (obviously, feel free to correct me if you feel I am misunderstanding you). 

I don't think anybody really disagrees with you if your stance is actually that: (i) getting top 5% grades in law school, securing an appellate clerkship, and getting into a top tier LLM is tougher than getting into a top tier masters program; and (ii) not everybody who can get into a strong PhD program would finish at the top of their class and secure an appellate clerkship. At least, I don't disagree with those two statements, and I don't read Deadpool's posts as doing so either. 

Edited November 19, 2021 by BlockedQuebecois

[CleanHands]

1 minute ago, BlockedQuebecois said:

-Snip-

He also strawmanned my earlier post as if I was suggesting that people who want to be either academics or, alternatively, lawyers shouldn't go to law school. Which was not a reasonable interpretation of my post in the context of the thread (whereby I was responding to an OP who expressed interest in academia and asked about supplementing a JD with an MA specifically to pursue that goal).

I had started to type out a response and then decided this guy wasn't worth one. And I'm validated that that was the right call because, like you, I have no idea what his position even is anymore in this argument with you and @Deadpool.

[Deadpool]

You can rework a writing sample for PhD programs many times. You can have multiple people review it. You can take all the time you need to craft it to perfection. Law school exams are typically 100% assessments done under time constraints, where you apply ratios from case law to fact scenarios. Some exams will also have a policy question as well (which I tended to do better on). Law school exams do not really care about how well you can craft an argument or proposal, or even if you have strong writing abilities. It is an issue-spotting exercise.

It is not difficult to get strong reference letters if you have good grades and/or build relationships with professors. I got RA experience and strong reference letters in courses where I did not perform at the top of the class, but had established relationships with the professors. Appellate and SCC clerkships care about writing samples and reference letters, yes, but you need be consistently performing well in all your classes to be competitive. I think we can all agree that performing top of your class in undergrad and master's is different than performing top of your class in a professional program like law school. In my master's program they handed out A's to almost anyone that put in a minimal amount of effort. 

I don't think anyone disagrees with you on how competitive top graduate programs are, if you are referring to ivy league schools, Oxbridge, and other internationally renowned schools. In the Canadian context, not many graduate programs fit this criteria. I did not extensively research Canadian PhD programs as I do not plan on getting one here. I think the main point of disagreement is that you are correlating law school performance with acceptance into top graduate programs. The skills assessed in both streams are quite different from one another. 

Just to relay to you how rare and competitive appellate and SCC clerkships are, in comparison to Oxford PhDs and the like: the federal government has hiring processes for graduate degree holders and they get a sea of applications from candidates with top master's and PhDs, while appellate and SCC clerkships are rare and help you stand out in these process. I worked in the federal government out of law school and top PhDs worked many levels below me. So, at least in some government hiring processes, it is clear that PhDs carried less weight than a law degree. A law degree + appellate/SCC clerkship is a dynamite combo and you can pretty much work anywhere after that. You cannot say the same about PhDs.

[Ben]

 

@BlockedQuebecois The exchange that led to the sentence you quoted above was @CleanHands' suggestion that 

Quote

I'd generally advise everyone not to go into a JD program with the intentions of pursuing academia (and not to consider that a potential career option unless and until they have achieved top tier JD grades). Nearly every legal academic was a JD medalist (or close to it), SCC clerk, HYS or Oxbridge grad degree holder, etc.

I responded that if that scares you away from doing a JD with a view toward academia, you probably have no chance at a career in academia anyway, which is presumably the alternative for someone who would decide not to do a JD because they're interested in academia. I stand by that, because it's true, and anyone who has done both or tried to do both will tell you that.  

Reading my post to suggest that "anybody who can get into a strong PhD program would get an appellate clerkship if they went to law school" is probably the least charitable way of interpreting it in that context. 

15 minutes ago, CleanHands said:

He also strawmanned my earlier post as if I was suggesting that people who want to be either academics or, alternatively, lawyers shouldn't go to law school. Which was not a reasonable interpretation of my post in the context of the thread (whereby I was responding to an OP who expressed interest in academia and asked about supplementing a JD with an MA specifically to pursue that goal).

I had started to type out a response and then decided this guy wasn't worth one. And I'm validated that that was the right call because, like you, I have no idea what his position even is anymore in this argument with you and @Deadpool.

No one is strawmanning you lmao. This is an advice thread for someone considering a career option. You said it is not a good idea to do a JD with the intent to pursue a career in academia. I said that that would only be true if you don't want to practice law in the event that your career in academia doesn't pan out. Quite the contrary to what you suggested, doing a JD with the intent to pursue a career in academia is probably the safest way to pursue that career, as far as future job prospects go. As I've already said but am happy to repeat, it's actually such a good idea that when you're in undergrad or a Master's program and express an interest in academia to philosophy or law professors, they will often suggest that you consider a JD and then legal academia, because of how much better the employment prospects are.