| Chapter 2: | Primary university qualifications to become a lawyer in the USA, the UK and South Africa |
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Chapter 2
Primary University Qualifications to Become a Lawyer in the USA, the UK and South Africa
2.1 Creation of the Juris Doctor (JD) Degree in the US
In the US, for a student to graduate as a lawyer, the student normally has to complete seven years in university, taking both a pre-law Bachelors degree and three years of law school. This trend emulates developments in the medical profession where it takes a medical student approximately seven years to graduate from medical school and then obtain the title ‘doctor’ . This explains, in part, why, in the early 1960s, the US changed the title of the primary American law degree from Bachelor of Laws degree (LLB) to Juris Doctor (JD) degree. As one report shows: