Unlike the situation in most academic disciplines, law professors typically do not possess a true doctoral degree.  The J.D. degree, the basic law degree in the United States, is the highest educational level attained by most law professors.  There was a time in the past when advanced law degrees, the LL.M. and the S.J.D., would viewed as desirable prerequisites for would-be law teachers, but that day has clearly passed.  The S.J.D. degree is nearly extinct, and the LL.M. has been reduced to a kind of specialization certificate that implies concentrated, but not necessarily advanced, law study.

New law professors have traditionally been hired to law school faculties on the basis of their impressive level of performance in law school.  High grades and law review membership have usually been equated with potential for teaching, particularly if they are supplemented with a prestigious clerkship and some, but not too much, experience as a practicing lawyer. Professors hired solely for their practical expertise in law are relatively rare.

A recently published study by Joni Hersch and W. Kip Viscusi, two law professors at Vanderbilt University, reveals that this situation maybe slowly changing.

According to Hersch and Viscusi, at least some law schools have begun to hire individuals whose credentials also include a Ph.D. degree. Although Ph.D. degrees in law are quite common in Europe and other parts of the world, they are almost unheard in the United States, so law professors with Ph.D. degrees in the United States usually hold the degree in a field other than law.

Examining the faculties of 26 “leading” law schools, Hersch and Viscusi, discovered that 361 of 1,338 current law professors (27%) have Ph.D. degrees.  Thirteen percent (13%) of faculty members have Ph.D. degrees in the social sciences other than economics; 7% have degrees in economics; and 7% have them in other fields ranging from English to chemistry.  Slightly more than 18% of law professors with Ph.D. degrees (65) possess a Ph.D. degree but no law degree.  However, most law professors with Ph.D. degrees (296) hold both a law degree and a Ph.D.

Northwestern University appears to have gone further than any other school in this regard, and 50% of its law faculty now hold Ph.D. degrees.  Other law schools with high percentages of Ph.D. professors include Pennsylvania (43%); UC-Berkeley (42%); Yale (40%); Cornell (40%); and Stanford (39%).

The issue of hiring law professors with Ph.D. degrees goes to the core of the question of the real purpose of law school education. If law schools are primarily academic departments charged with providing students with a sophisticated analytical framework for studying the structure and function of American law, then the Ph.D. law professors, with their systematic training in scholarship and research, clearly have an edge over their non-Ph.D. counterparts who typically scramble for years trying to pick up such skills on the fly.  On the other hand, if the primary purpose of law schools is to prepare lawyers for the nuts and bolts of the practice of law, the Ph.D. law professor is probably at a disadvantage, having spent years in graduate school rather in setting where one learns what it really means to practice law.

Obviously, the temptation is to say that law schools should be both, both centers of scholarship and sources of practical training.  However, balancing the scholarly with the practical is a challenge.  As it is, much of the legal scholarship produced by law professors is held in relatively low regard by the other branches of the academy, and the bar regularly complains that law schools are not doing an adequate job of preparing their students for the realities of law practice.

The Marquette Law School faculty currently includes four professors with Ph.D. degrees.  Three earned their degrees in American universities: Professors Blinka (History); Hylton (History of American Civilization); and Papke (American Studies); while the fourth, Professor Calboli, received hers in law from a European university.