Background On Legal Education in Common Law Countries
To become a lawyer and practice law in most states and countries, a person must first obtain a law degree. While in most common law countries a Bachelor of Laws (or LL.B.) is required, the U.S. and Canada generally require a professional doctorate, or Juris Doctor, to practice law.
If a person wishes to gain specialized knowledge through research in a particular area of law, he or she can continue his or her studies after an LL.B or J.D. in an LL.M. program. The word legum is the genitive plural form of the Latin word lex and means "of the laws". When used in the plural, it signifies a specific body of laws, as opposed to the general collective concept embodied in the word jus, from which the words "juris" and "justice" derive.
The highest research degree in law is the S.J.D. (or J.S.D., depending on the institution), and it is equivalent to the Doctor of Philosophy in Law (PhD or DPhil depending on the law school in UK), Doctorat en Droit (in France), or the Doktor der Rechtswissenschaften (Dr.iur.) in Germany. There are also variant doctoral degrees, such as the D.C.L. (Doctor of Civil Law) degree bestowed by McGill University in Montreal. Most schools require an LL.M. before admission to a SJD or a PhD in law degree program. Like the PhD, the SJD degree generally requires a dissertation that is graded (often by two graders), orally defended (by an exam known as Viva) and then often published as a book or series of articles.
The "Doctor of Laws" (LL.D.) degree in the United States of America is usually an honorary degree.
Read more about this topic: Master Of Laws
Famous quotes containing the words background, legal, education, common, law and/or countries:
“They were more than hostile. In the first place, I was a south Georgian and I was looked upon as a fiscal conservative, and the Atlanta newspapers quite erroneously, because they didn’t know anything about me or my background here in Plains, decided that I was also a racial conservative.”
—Jimmy Carter (James Earl Carter, Jr.)
“I have spent all my life under a Communist regime, and I will tell you that a society without any objective legal scale is a terrible one indeed. But a society with no other scale but the legal one is not quite worthy of man either.”
—Alexander Solzhenitsyn (b. 1918)
“He was the product of an English public school and university. He was, moreover, a modern product of those seats of athletic exercise. He had little education and highly developed muscles—that is to say, he was no scholar, but essentially a gentleman.”
—H. Seton Merriman (1862–1903)
“Conscious virtue is the only solid foundation of all happiness; for riches, power, rank, or whatever, in the common acceptation of the word, is supposed to constitute happiness, will never quiet, much less cure, the inward pangs of guilt.”
—Philip Dormer Stanhope, 4th Earl Chesterfield (1694–1773)
“The times have changed. Why do you make a fuss
For privilege when there’s no law of form?”
—Allen Tate (1899–1979)
“I have never looked at foreign countries or gone there but with the purpose of getting to know the general human qualities that are spread all over the earth in very different forms, and then to find these qualities again in my own country and to recognize and to further them.”
—Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe (1749–1832)