Legal History at UVA Law

CHARLES BARZUN: What I am going to talk about is legal history. Because the University of Virginia School of Law offers a program that is somewhat unique. In fact, I think it's the only one I know of in the country. Which is that you can get a master's degree in history from the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences over on Main Grounds there. I hope you guys have been in Charlottesville long enough to that we talk about grounds and not campuses. Have you gotten that? OK, good. That's very important. You'll be kicked out of town if you don't say that right. No, I'm kidding.

So on Main Grounds, you can get a master's degree in history and a JD in the same three-year period. So there are lots of joint degree programs around the country, but this one is distinctive in being that you can do it in three years. I graduated from the Law School in 2005 and I did the program. And I am now one of the directors of it. I run it with some historians over on Main Grounds.

So I want to tell you a little bit about that program. OK, so it might not-- and it won't take very long. But you may have no interest in that. That's why I was saying I'm worried about how it was described on the sheet. But it at least suggests you have some interest in legal history. So even sort of through the process of telling you about the particular program, I think you will also learn something about how to take advantage of some of the legal history resources at the Law School.

I basically want to talk about the why, what, and how of the program. Why you might want to do it, what it entails, and then how you'd go about doing it if you do want to do it. OK, the why are basically two reasons. Two reasons people mainly do the program is one, if they have an interest in going into academic law, doing what I do and what other professors here do.

The reason is because it gives you an opportunity to engage a substantial work of scholarship. You write a master's thesis. And you work with advisor. Actually, two advisors. One here at the law school, one on Main Grounds. And you really work on developing a scholarly project. You all will have a writing requirement just to get your JD. You need a writing requirement. But that's relatively straightforward, and you don't necessarily get a lot of help writing that. You just have to write a paper.

So one reason is it's to develop an academic profile in a sense, or get your feet wet doing academic work. The second and by far more common reason I want to underline is simply intellectual curiosity. Right, a lot of people know they're going to go work at a firm or at a nonprofit or the government or whatever. And they've enjoyed studying history in college. Or maybe they wish they had studied history in college and they didn't or they're just interested in learning more about the law than the doctrine. I mean, you get a lot more than just the doctrine and the classes in the law school. But you want to round it out with something more, and so you're interested in doing something a little bit more.

I tend to think of it-- I joke that it's like doing a substantial extracurricular. Only the extracurricular is itself curricular. It's taking extra classes because you're into it. That is the more common reason. Most of the people who graduate from the program, and they're usually three to five a year, don't go on to academic jobs.

OK, so that's the why. Those are the two main reasons. The what is basically three things. The program is constituted by three things, and it's really two things and the third one is just a little one. The two things are, one, you write a master's thesis, which I just mentioned, of 12,000 words, which is about 40 pages. So you work that. You turn that in the end of your third year.

Two, you take a lot of legal history classes. And I'll explain more a little bit about exactly how it works. But basically you're taking about-- after your first year in law school, for the second two years of law school, about half your courses are in legal history. OK, or history. Or straight up history.

And the third thing is that you simply have to present your thesis in a short presentation to your advisors and usually the other students in the program. I'm organizing actually that right now. This year, the graduating [? field ?] class actually is the biggest year we've ever had. And I might add, ever will have. It was too many of-- we're going to be eight students. So right now, I'm in the process of setting up their thesis presentations. Or when you get a PhD, it's called a defense. We feel like that's a little too-- it's a war word. We like to just talk about it as a presentation.

So that's basically what it is. But that's relatively small compared to the other two, which are substantial, which is writing a major paper and taking a lot of classes. Now let me go drill a little bit deeper into the classes part of it and what exactly that means. Because you might think, well, getting two degrees in three years, that sounds like a lot. And it is, but this is how it works.

OK, so when you all come to the law school, you need 86 credits for the JD, OK. That is an ABA rule that is required for everyone who goes to law school. I assume that's true in other law schools. I guess I've never checked. I assume it's a general rule. But all I can speak to is that UVA, you need 86 credits to graduate, OK, for your JD. Nevermind anything else.

Then to get a master's degree requires 30 credits. OK, that's what normally a standard two-year master's degree involves. OK, now we're going to do some basic math here. My tort students always hate it when we get into math, but I think this level of math is going to be OK. That equals 116 credits. I hope that's still true. That is still true, right? OK, good.

That's a lot of credits. But thankfully, you don't have to do that. And here is why. Because six of your JD credits count towards your master's degree. OK. And in fact, first year students, you already do one of those. Right, one of the standard first year classes-- Torts, Contracts, Civil Procedure, Constitutional Law and Property-- which are four credits, those count. As a JD class, it will count towards your MA, because there is substantial historical content.

That often happens to be true because of the nature of law, that almost all the classes in the law school will satisfy that requirement that there are substantial historical content. So six credits right off the bat you don't have to do. The more important one ends up being that for 12 of your master's credits that you're taking on Main Grounds and the GSAS, Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, also can be counted towards your JD.

Now quick sidebar here. I take my role in running this program as being a sort of evangelist in general for students who-- because any student who comes to a presentation like this and I basically do a presentation like this during the year for 1Ls is interested in doing something beyond the standard curriculum. And so one thing I like to emphasize is that even if you don't do the program, you can do a lot of the stuff that the program offers.

For instance, those 12 credits, you can take 12 credits of GSAS courses as a regular JD student anytime. Any student can do this, right. Over on Main Grounds. And it will count towards your 86 credits. So that's just something to know. It's also something to know if you end up going to a different school. Because that, again, is true of other schools as well.

Right, there is a limit to it. The ABA actually limits it. Right, there's what they call non-law classroom hours is like a category and it can't be too big. Maybe it's this or maybe we come short of it, I'm not sure. I mean, 12 credits is basically, again, after your first year, one class every semester. So if you wanted to, right, you could take a class in biology or whatever you wanted or philosophy during your time in law school.

So that's just something to note. OK, but 12 of those credits for the program count towards your JD. OK, so then that leaves a much smaller number. That leaves 98 credits, OK. And that is what you do, OK, to do the JDMA program. Now what that means is, as you can tell, minus the 86, what that means is 12 credits are what we call master's only credits. That means you if you do the program, you do the joint degree program, what it means is that as compared to your classmates who are regular JD students, you take 12 extra credits, and again, to repeat what I just said, that is essentially one class each semester for your second two years in law school.

That's why I say it's very tangible extracurricular endeavor. Right, it's just instead of doing whatever, spending time on softball or more charitably, a journal, you're spending time taking an extra class on Main Grounds. On whatever you want, I mean, in history. The next level of discussion of this, if people who are really interested in the program and we can talk about this next year, is figuring out you find people in the History Department who would be who would be good to match your interests. Usually you want to figure out some kind of area of interest that you then pursue.

Which actually leads to the last part. Right, so OK, so there's that. That's the classes. Right, there's that. There's the thesis that you're working on. And actually one of these classes is in your second year, you take a class that's basically designed to get you going on your thesis. There's no content, reading content to the course. It's basically just students working on their thesis, talking with each other about their ideas and stuff like that. So you actually get a draft of your thesis done by the end of your second year from a class that you take.

OK, so that's the what part of this. That's essentially the content. You write a thesis, and you take these extra legal history classes. The final part of what I want to say is just the how, which is if you're interested in doing this, how do you do it? Well, you don't have to do anything now, which is nice. It's really around a year from right now. I mean, hopefully a little bit earlier.

But the deadline is May 1st of every year. And if you look at the website, what the website says is have to apply to the law school and get in and then apply to the master's and get in. And then it makes it sound like there's a third step, but it's not really. You have already done the hardest part, which is-- at least is the name of this weekend is descriptively accurate, you are all admitted students. OK, so that means that you've already done the hardest part, which is to get into the law school.

Now then in your first year you apply to the program, and then you do have to get into that program. And there, what is required is basically a personal statement not unlike what you wrote for law school probably, 500 words, and two letters of recommendation. I think it's two letters, yeah. Which you can get from your same recommenders who wrote your recommendations for law school. The only thing that I'm always reminding students at the time is have to actually go back to those recommenders and get them to click a few buttons to upload the PDF file.

Again, you can't just have the SRO, the Student Records Office, send it over to Main Grounds. By law, they're not allowed to do that. So you have to go back. But the content can be the same. Right, so it's a pretty low-- I won't say low bar. It's not a low bar. It's a low amount of work that you have to do to do the application. You have to fill out the online form. You have to get your recommenders to send the two recommendations in.

The hardest thing to do is just to write a 500-word personal statement. And in that personal statement, you basically just want to say why you want to do the program. What you're interested in studying. And again, this is next level where we could talk about it. But you'd want to go and find out, people in the History Department, who you might want to work with and what kinds of things they're doing that you find interesting. And same for professors over here.

Now so that's basically-- and I should just mention one thing, which I forgot to mention at the beginning, because I don't really think of it as a reason to do the program. But it is just something that we can brag about, so I'll mention it. Which is that precisely because JDMA students get more work, do more work on their paper than just the average seminar paper, they account for a disproportionately high number of writing awards at graduation and published notes in the Virginia Law Review. So I don't how many of you are familiar with this, but a student note, which is a term of art, it means a student work of scholarship.

So the Law Review, the Virginia Law Review, and other law reviews publish notes, student notes, that they select. And the JDMA students outperform. We only account for about 1% to 2% of the class. And at least by my last measure, which was now-- this is a few years old. I'm not sure, I need to update this. But a few years ago, they accounted for 25% of all writing awards at graduation.

And that's not a surprise. It's because that's a big part of what they're doing. All right, so they're putting a lot more work and effort into it. But anyway, if you care about that sort of thing, that's another little bell and whistle, as it were. I think that's basically-- I've probably forgotten something. Oh, one slight thing that is worth keeping in mind when thinking about doing the program is that all these classes, thes ones that-- the MA classes that count towards your JD and these ones-- but this is obvious, this is less obvious.

All of these classes, which is 24 credits, do not count towards your GPA. You get credit for them as having completed them, but it's like a P. Right, it's like a pass. It doesn't hurt your GPA. It's just not factored into it. Because it's unconstrained by the mean. Because it's essentially, it's not a law school class. It's like you're over on Main Grounds. Even if you're in this building, it's like you're over on Main Grounds taking a history class. And they're not constrained by a mean over there in the History Department. So that's just one thing to keep in mind.