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Philosophy PhD, then a JD degree?

In our most recent "how can we help you?" thread, a reader asks:

I've heard some discussion of getting a JD before a PhD in philosophy (e.g., on Leiter's site), but I haven't heard anything in reverse: going from a PhD in philosophy to a JD. So, I'm interested in answers to any/all of these questions:

A) Would having a PhD in philosophy give an applicant a significant advantage in law school admissions?

B) Would this route make one more or less competitive at schools with AOS in political philosophy or philosophy of law?

C) Is going from a PhD in philosophy to practicing law a viable alt-ac route that others have taken?

All good questions. Do any readers have any helpful insights?

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6 responses to “Philosophy PhD, then a JD degree?”

  1. Lawyer

    I took this route.
    A) I doubt it. At least historically, law school admissions decisions are to a very large extent driven by schools’ desire to maintain their US News rankings, and those are in turn determined by the undergrad GPA and LSAT scores of admitted students. This may have changed a bit in recent years due to some opposition to US News and schools also allowing admission without an LSAT score, but old habits die hard. When I applied, a little over a decade ago, I didn’t really outperform what my gpa and lsat predicted.
    B) not sure I understand the question. Is this a question about law school admissions? If so, same answer as above, although I’ll note that UChicago favorably cited my philosophy background in their admission letter. Or is this a question about academic (as opposed to legal) employment, post-JD? I didn’t pursue this, so can’t really comment.
    C) law school is basically trade school; I would only recommend you put yourself through it if you plan to be a practicing lawyer; it’s not worth the time and expense if you are merely hoping to improve your employment prospects as a philosopher. If you go to a top-ranked school and get at least halfway decent grades, it’s relatively easy to find a good legal job—the situation is truly incomparable to the academic job market.

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  2. LegalPhil

    I agree with Lawyer, but in case the OP is asking about the academic job market in (b), from personal experience I’d say yes, having a JD helps in getting jobs with an AOS in philosophy of law, and to a much lesser extent political philosophy. I don’t think it’s worth getting the JD for those purposes, but it will help, especially with Phil Law jobs. Very few people working in philosophy of law lack a JD.
    If you do really well in law school, the JD-PhD combo could get you an academic law job, but you’ll have to stay in touch with your PhD mentors and their network all through law school or else make similar inroads in the legal academy while in law school, and you’ll have to publish. All that could be difficult to do while pursuing a JD. 

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  3. Phil and law

    The answers to these questions are very dependent on the quality of law school to which one is applying. I’m interpreting the second question as asking the same as the first but specifically about schools that have lots of people working in legal Phil. Those schools are basically at the top of the rankings. For these schools, I do think that all else equal, the phd helps with admissions on the margins. It would not enable you to overcome a poor lsat or undergraduate gpa (and note that they don’t care about your graduate gpa), but for top schools, there’s an overabundance of people who are applying with the requisite stats, so non-stat factors matter. I also think it helps with the classic “why this school” essay, which plenty but not all places require. Finally, it would help at places like YLS and HLS and Chicago that in fact send the most students into academia. You might also look at the NYU Furman program.
    I agree that it would be a bad idea to get a law degree— maybe even a FREE law degree through, say, Chicago’s Rubinstein scholarship or NYU’s Furman—in order to get pure philosophy jobs. My understanding is that basically everyone who has both a jd and PhD goes on both the law and philosophy teaching markets because it simply doesn’t make sense not to. But the reality is that legal scholarship is markedly different (and most philosophers would say markedly worse!) than philosophy scholarship. The papers are typically over 20k words, and the quality of scholarship is far lower. Law reviews are edited by students, and I know plenty of philosophers have found it hard to publish in them for that reason.
    Regarding the last question, I’m naive enough to not know if alt ac means an alternative way of getting into academia or an alternative to academia. If it’s the first, then yes. Leiter has something on the UChicago website on ways into legal academia that goes into this. You should also look at lawsky’s hiring data, which is a truly excellent resource for aspiring legal academics. If the question is about just going into legal practice full time, then the answer is also yes. As another commenter said, the legal market is SO much broader than the academic market. At top schools, even people with mediocre grades can often walk into high paying jobs. The question is whether you can find one that interests you (and whether you can find one doing work you find ethically sound!).

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  4. OP

    OP here, just to clarify b): I’m asking if a JD would help land a philosophy job with a phil. law AOS. Two worries that made me think it might not: a) full-time law students likely aren’t publishing because they’re too busy, and b) maybe committees have weird views that getting a JD after a PhD looks un-focused.

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  5. JD-PhD

    To OP’s Follow-Up:
    I agree with the other poster that a JD will give a small advantage in applying for philosophy of law positions. As someone with both degrees, I’ve heard this from a hiring chair.

    I don’t believe that committees will think you are unfocused if your AOS is philosophy of law.

    Great responses in this thread. I want to second that law schools are hyper-focused on UGPA and LSAT. The only other significant factor at most schools is diversity, and after the Supreme Court ruled against affirmative action, who knows how that will continue to work.
    But, posters are also correct that if you are in the running (based on UGPA and LSAT) for a few top law schools like Yale and Chicago, the admissions office will treat your PhD as a plus factor. These schools are oriented towards scholarship (as opposed to the trade school aspects of law school), and they will like that you have a philosophy PhD.
    Yale JDs have a very good lifetime placement rate into legal academia. If you would like to be a professor and would be happy with legal academia (and don’t like your current chances with a PhD), then going to Yale maximizes your chances of getting a TT position of some kind.

    Another advantage of schools like Yale and Chicago for someone in your position is that you will be able to work on publishable material with the free time you will have or in seminars you can take for credit. Because every student at Yale or Chicago is pretty much guaranteed a well-paying “big law” job if they want it and the curriculum focuses less on memorization and doctrine, you can likely find more time here for scholarship than you would have attending even a very good law school like Vanderbilt that is not at the tip-top of the U.S. News.

    Law school can be all-consuming in a way that grad school is not. To excel in law school, you need to participate in time-consuming extracurriculars like law review and moot court. The social life is fairly insular and will remind you of high school (caveat, I noticed some older students in their 30s opting out of this, but you can’t opt out of things like law review without weakening your resume and the best law review jobs are determined by a popularity contest among law review members that you will lose if you are not going to law school social outings). It’s worth considering if you want to take this deviation from normal adult life for three years to be part of student clubs, etc. Also, to maximize the prestige of your JD and your chances of getting hired at a law school, you should factor in another year clerking for a federal judge after law school.

    A question for the group:
    In my estimation, if there’s a perception problem for the JD-PhD, it’s the chance that philosophy hiring committees will be reluctant to give you a job because they know how few and precious TT lines are in philosophy and they know that you have lots of ways to make a living (including a very lucrative living) in the law. This is a fear I’ve had; any thoughts from those in the thread?

    Reply
  6. LegalPhil

    To JD-PhD’s question for the group: in my experience you have nothing to worry about. It would be nice if hiring committees considered whether and how much a candidate needed the job, if only as one factor among the others. But they don’t, at least not in my experience. If they think a JD would make you better suited to the job — which they will if the job has legal philosophy as an AOS — then they’ll use it to your advantage, with no countervailing concerns about your needing the job less.

    Reply

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