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<<The University of Toronto Faculty of Law was the first law school in Canada to make the change in 2001, while Queen's University Faculty of Law in Kingston, Ontario, will start offering JDs this fall.
This is mostly a cosmetic change — really just a renaming of the degree. The current LLB is a graduate degree that typically takes three years to earn, just like a JD. Switching to the new name doesn't grant ABA accreditation or involve a new curriculum. It's primarily a name change.
So why rename the degree? This is a trend that is also spreading to Australia and some other Commonwealth countries, and even some in Hong Kong. The main reason is to improve the profile of students nationally. A Juris Doctor is more familiar to U.S. firm managers, as well as other nationalities. Everyone's heard of a Juris Doctor, while an LLB is not as familiar to most.
Increasingly, students compete in a global market, so having a degree name that is familiar helps level the playing field. It is unclear whether the increased competitiveness is enough to outweigh the potential for confusion between US JDs and Canadian JDs when staying inside Canada.
In any case, you can't sneer at those poor Canadians who don't have JDs anymore. Semantics is a wonderful thing!
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