I’ve touched on this a number of times over the years, but I believe this idea warrants its own piece. Across the U.S., going to an ABA-accredited J.D. program is generally seen as the path to become a lawyer somewhere in the United States for those without prior legal training abroad. Schools vary based on prestige, employment prospects, bar outcomes, faculty, and so much more. But this general idea holds true: whether you’re at a Top X school or an unranked school, you can sit side-by-side in the Summer three years after 1L orientation as you take a bar exam to both begin your legal careers in State Y.

The biggest challenge that I’ve seen over the last dozen years in my career is that the LL.M. degree lacks a unifying theme like that. In short, the LL.M. means too many different things to too many different people in the U.S. legal education industry.

Too Many Different Things to Too Many Different People: What does the LL.M. mean to the ABA? To deans of law schools? To finance teams at law schools and universities? To burgeoning Non-J.D. shops where the LL.M. is no longer their shiniest star? To LL.M. alumni from a different era? To the current and prospective LL.M. students navigating a transformative era? To State Board of Law/Bar Examiners? To people whose paycheck is derived from their law schools offering LL.M. degrees? And so many others?

The more I’ve thought about it, the more I tend to think that most of the issues I highlight (publicly and privately) stem from that point. And based on so many things, including things outside the control of U.S. law schools, I don’t see that changing anytime soon.

What the LL.M. means to a school determines much of the LL.M. experience. Because of the framework from the ABA’s Overview of Post-J.D. and Non-J.D. Programs, each school has to make their own individualized determinations on what the LL.M. program means to them. And that means that the same LL.M. degree can mean very different things at different law schools. I even hinted to that in my January 2024 International Jurist piece, “Balancing Your Purpose and the Law School’s Purpose for an LL.M.“

Two big-picture things when I think of LL.M. programs across ABA-accredited law schools:

• Whether the LL.M. program at the schools you’re seriously considering are designed to maximize revenue or not. You won’t be able to figure that out (I have no idea the inner workings of U.S. law school Non-J.D. finances and don’t pretend to know). But what I’d think about? What is the size of the program relative to the J.D. population? What other Non-J.D. programs does the law school offer? What is the size of the LL.M. team? What is the scholarship situation like as a general rule?
• What does the LL.M. program mean to the larger law school community? I generally don’t like the law school within a law school model (though I’ve seen some exceptions that make sense). But thinking about what J.D. faculty, J.D. students, and J.D. staff think about the LL.M. program at your shortlist schools can be an important indication of what the LL.M. program means there.

What Should an LL.M. Mean? A story for the next piece!