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Ph.D. Program

The ph.d. in law degree.

The Ph.D. in Law degree program is designed to prepare J.D. graduates for careers as legal scholars and teachers through a doctoral program aimed at the production of a substantial body of academic research and writing under the close supervision of a three-member faculty dissertation committee. Unlike programs designed for students who wish to learn about law from the disciplinary perspectives of the social sciences or the humanities, the Ph.D. in Law is directed at students who wish to pursue advanced studies in law from the perspective of the law. This program offers emerging scholars an opportunity to contribute to the development of law as an academic field, and it provides an alternate pathway into law teaching alongside existing routes such as fellowships, advanced degrees in cognate fields, legal practice, and clerkships.

Because our entering Ph.D. students will have already completed their J.D. degrees, the anticipated course of study toward the Ph.D. in Law degree is three academic years and two summers in residence. In their first two semesters, Ph.D. students will enroll in courses designed to help them acquire the background and research skills needed to complete a dissertation in their field of interest and to prepare them for qualifying examinations that test the depth and breadth of the literacies and skills they have acquired. During their second year, students will prepare a dissertation prospectus and begin work on a dissertation. The dissertation may take the form of either three law review articles or a book-length manuscript and will make up a portfolio of writing that will be essential for success in the job market. Ph.D. students will also gain experience in the classroom, and receive the full support of Yale Law School’s Law Teaching Program , which has had remarkable success in placing graduates in tenure-track positions at leading law schools.

Ph.D. students receive a full-tuition waiver, a health award for health insurance coverage, and a stipend to cover their year-round living expenses, as well as support for participation in national and international conferences.

Applications for admission to the Ph.D. in Law program are available starting on August 15. The deadline for submission of all materials is December 15. Applicants to the Ph.D. in Law program must complete a J.D. degree at a U.S. law school before they matriculate and begin the Ph.D. program. Any questions about the program may be directed to Gordon Silverstein, Assistant Dean for Graduate Programs, at [email protected] .

Watch Gordon Silverstein, Assistant Dean for Graduate Programs, describe the Ph.D. program at Yale Law School.

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LL.M. Admissions

5005 Wasserstein Hall (WCC) 1585 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA02138

Apply to the Graduate Program

The LL.M. (Master of Laws) program is a one-year degree program that typically includes 180 students from some 70 countries.

The Graduate Program is interested in attracting intellectually curious and thoughtful candidates from a variety of legal systems and backgrounds and with various career plans. Harvard’s LL.M. students include lawyers working in firms or NGOs, government officials, law professors, judges, diplomats, activists, doctoral students, business people, and others. The diversity of the participants in the LL.M. program contributes significantly to the educational experience of all students at the School.

LL.M. Application Deadlines and Materials

Ll.m. tuition and financial aid, ll.m. admissions faq, sample applications.

  • View a sample 2024 LL.M. application (PDF)
  • View a sample 2024 financial aid application (PDF)

Eligibility Requirements

To be considered for the LL.M. program, an applicant must have a J.D. (Juris Doctor) from an ABA-approved U.S. law school or a first law degree (J.D., LL.B. or the equivalent) from a foreign law school. Harvard Law School is rarely able to accept into its LL.M. program anyone who already holds (or is pursuing) an LL.M. from another law school in the United States.

Admissions Criteria

Admission to the LL.M. program is highly competitive. Each year approximately 1,600 applicants compete for around 180 places in the LL.M. program. Most applicants are fully qualified for the program, and the Committee on Graduate Studies must select from among a large number of candidates who have excellent credentials. In evaluating applications, the Committee takes into consideration the applicant’s grades and rank in their law and other university studies, letters of recommendation, occupational interests, professional and personal accomplishments, and other factors, including the following:

  • For LL.M. Applicants from Abroad : The program is designed for intellectually curious and thoughtful candidates who come from a variety of legal systems and backgrounds and who have demonstrated an intent to return to their country to contribute to academia or the legal profession. We are equally interested in applicants pursuing careers in law teaching and research, government service, the judiciary, international organizations, non-governmental organizations and private practice.  While we do not require work experience, we generally find that applicants who have had at least two years of work experience or further study beyond law school have a better sense of what they hope to accomplish during the LL.M. program. As a result, they often are able to submit stronger applications, and those who end up enrolling in the LL.M. program often find that their experience makes it easier for them to select courses and identify research topics, and in general get more out of their LL.M. year.
  • For LL.M. Applicants from the United States : The program is designed for graduates of U.S. law schools who have had at least two or three years of experience beyond law school and who have committed themselves to a career in law teaching. In the admissions process, the Committee focuses primarily on applicants who have excelled in their basic law school studies, who elicit strong letters of recommendation from law school teachers and others familiar with their work, and who have spent at least two years working as a law school teacher, judicial clerk, or practitioner in a public agency or private practice. Evidence of graduate education in a field other than law is also significant. Weight will be given to materials demonstrating the applicant’s interest in, commitment to, and capability for a career in law teaching.

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Georgetown Law

Programs for non-lawyers.

Georgetown University Law Center offers two graduate level programs for non-lawyers: the online  Master of Studies in Law (MSL) in Taxation  and the  Master of Law and Technology.

Georgetown University Law Center's world-renowned Graduate Tax Program has the largest tax curriculum of any school in the United States. Students who are experienced tax professionals but not attorneys can now take advanced tax courses at Georgetown Law and earn an  online Master of Studies in Law (MSL) in Taxation . Non-lawyers are also eligible to complete a certificate in  International Taxation  or  State and Local Taxation . While the  online MSL in Taxation  will not prepare or qualify students for the practice of law or to sit for any state bar exam, it does provide experienced tax professionals an opportunity to study tax law at the most advanced levels. 

Georgetown Law's M aster’s degree program, the Master of Law and Technology, is for non-lawyers who need to better understand the technology law landscape.  The first cohort began classes in Fall 2020. More than ever, lawyers and policymakers need a deep understanding of technology and the legal frameworks around it. Law firms are building specialized practices to meet increased legal demands around data security, privacy, artificial intelligence, fintech, and emerging technologies. Elected officials and government agencies require well-grounded counsel to update tech law and regulations. The business and public interest worlds alike demand advocates who can address new legal, ethical and societal challenges as they arise alongside rapid advances in technology. 

Contact Information

For questions about the application process and admissions requirements, please contact the Graduate Admissions Office at  [email protected]  or 202-662-9015.

To learn more about the MSL in Taxation online program, please contact: Cynthia Rockwell, Director for Executive and Online Programs Email Address:  Cynthia Rockwell

To learn more about the MLT program, please contact Mary Pat Dwyer, Director, Technology and Law Policy Phone: (202) 662 - 9036 Email: Mary Pat Dwyer

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PhD in Law

Regarded as the highest degree in varied academic disciplines, a Doctorate of Philosophy ( PhD ) aims to provide students with a chance to delve deeper into a specific area of study. For a field like Law, a doctoral degree is suitable for those wanted to pursue their career as legal scholars and teachers. A PhD in Law incorporates intense coursework followed by detailed research in the chosen specialization. The program is devised for students who want to gain in-depth knowledge and advanced studies in the domain. If you also want to secure a doctorate degree in Law, you should definitely aim for attaining overseas education for the same. Through this blog, we will elucidate various aspects of PhD in Law, the eligibility criteria you need to fulfil, course structure and specialisations as well as top universities.

This Blog Includes:

Specialisations offered, course structure, top universities abroad offering phd in law, top colleges in india, entrance exams in india, phd in law: distance education, important books, eligibility for phd in law, application process , required documents .

Commonly offered as a 3-year degree, a PhD in Law implements a multidisciplinary approach and aims to impart students with the required theoretical background and research skills in the former part of the program while they are required to prepare their dissertation during the latter part. Often pursued as a full-time course, this degree prepares individuals for several leadership roles in Judiciary, Business, Academics as well as Government.

There are a plethora of concentrations available under PhD in Law from which applicants can choose from. These courses connect the vast discipline of law with its relevant sub-fields, hence students can opt for a unique course and specialize in the same. Selecting a particular specialization also helps to delve deeper into it by pursuing research. Take a look at the following list of PhD in Law specialisations: 

  • PhD in Interdisciplinary Law
  • PhD in International Law
  • PhD in Legal Studies 
  • PhD in Cyber Law
  • PhD in Civil Law 
  • PhD in Jurisprudence 
  • PhD in Administrative Law Studies 
  • PhD in Environmental Law  
  • PhD in National Law Studies 
  • PhD in Dispute Resolution  

Check Out: Law Subjects

The curriculum and syllabus of a PhD in Law can vary as per the specialisation as well the academic institution. But in order to provide you with a general overview, the following paragraphs describe the structure of this doctoral degree as followed for a 3-year program.

  • In the first year of a PhD in Law, students get to focus on the coursework of their specialisations with their prospective Advisory Committees. Along with this, it also comprises a seminar regarding legal scholarships and methodologies. With all this, the degree also incorporates canonical workshops on legal scholarships in the first semester of the year. In the second semester, students are required to present a report on the same. 
  • During the second year, you will get to work with the faculty dissertation committee. Students have to present the dissertation in a manuscript of almost a book’s length or 3 articles that can be published thus constituting the portfolio. Afterwards, the committees will provide their views on one’s dissertation prospectus and give their seal of approval if they liked the topic. Apart from this intense research work of PhD in Law, students ought to compulsorily participate in teaching activities where they can work as teaching assistants, co-teaching with faculty etc.  
  • In the third year, students can either continue with their teaching as a professor of Law or they can go on with improvising their dissertation. In many cases, one can devote themselves to their research projects while pursuing teaching and at the conclusion of the third year, they will be required to submit their dissertation. However, the extension of the duration can also happen depending on a case-to-case basis.

Deciding the right university for a course can be a strenuous task and requires professional help. Leading law schools and universities around the globe possess the necessary capabilities to transform the personalities of enrolled students. These extra-edge attributes can help you have a kickstart in your career and convert your career aspirations into success. To grab a taste of global exposure and a plethora of opportunities in this field, here are some top-notch universities offering PhD in Law that you must consider:

Tabulated below are the top colleges in India offering a PhD in law. You can have a look here:

There are various entrance exams in India that you can apply for and attempt in order to be selected for a PhD in Law. They are mentioned below.

Did you know that you can pursue a PhD in law through distance education? A lot of established and good colleges as well as universities offer the course part-time or through correspondence. Tabulate below are some of the important colleges that offer PhD in Law through distance learning.

Tabulated below are the important and informative books you can refer to while pursuing a PhD in Law. You can check it out here: 

PhD Law Admission Process 

There are two ways of getting admission in PhD in Law. You can either get direct admission or merit. 

Direct Admission

  • For direct admission, you must get the admission form from the college or university. You can get it both offline and online.
  • To get the application form you can go to the official website of the institute or college and fill the form there. You can upload it there and then.
  • Once you have completed filling out the application form you must go to the college for counselling and also attend the round of personal interviews.

Merit-Based Admission 

  • The important exams conducted to give admission on the basis of merit include JMI Law Entrance Exam, CLAT, AILET – All India Law Entrance Test , NET – National Eligibility Test , and PET – PhD Entrance Test. 
  • Students can apply for these exams both offline and online. The forms for the respective exams can be downloaded on their official websites. 
  • Admission will be given on the basis of the subsequent marks obtained by students in these exams. 

To get enrolled in any degree, candidates need to meet certain prerequisites specified for the course by the institution. Since there are a lot of specializations available for PhD in Law, the eligibility criteria tend to differ from one university to another. Below listed are some essential requirements that you need to fulfil in order to apply for the program:

  • Bachelor’s degree in Law such as LLB or any other related discipline 
  • Master’s degree in Law, i.e. LLM although some universities may allow candidates having a postgraduate degree in similar disciplines  
  • Students are also required to qualify for the LSAT exam with a good score. 
  • Research Proposal (Around 1000 words): Describing the scope of the project along with undertaken dissertation. 
  • If you’re applying to foreign universities, you need to give English Language Proficiency Tests such as IELTS , TOEFL , etc.
  • It is recommended for the candidates have a well-designed Curriculum Vitae.

This is another important aspect you need to keep in mind if you’re planning to become a lawyer. But the application process might get overwhelming. This is where the professional from Leverage Edu will help you. It’s important to complete the application process without any mistakes. Here are crucial things to consider:

  • Call us and we will help you shortlist your favourite law universities . But you need to submit your application to multiple universities to broaden your chances of getting selected. 
  • Compile all essential documents. Don’t make mistakes while submitting the documents. 
  • Submit the application before the deadlines and start the application process for accommodation, students visa, and scholarships / student loans .
  • Accept the offer letter

The documentation process is one of the most essential steps you should consider. But making some common mistakes will jeopardize your application. The documents you need to submit are::

  • Educational certificates. As you’re going for a law degree, you need to provide your other mark sheets such as the 12th mark sheet, UG mark sheet, etc.  
  • Letter of recommendation
  • Letter of intent 
  • Financial documents 
  • Statement of purpose  

Career Prospects and Salary

After completing your PhD in law from a reputed university, you will be able to boost your chances of getting hired by top companies. Employers will take a look at your university name as it will have a huge impact on your employability. Therefore, make sure you complete your PhD degree from a reputed university to stand apart from the crowd. Here are the jobs you can get after completing your PhD in law:

  • Law Professor
  • Political Advisor
  • Project Manager
  • Compliance Manager

The salary of a lawyer who holds a PhD degree will vary from one designation to another as well as the country. Here’s a table:

Also Read: Law Entrance Exams India & Abroad     

Taw law and corporate law are the most effective.

If you want to get into a high-ranked university, you’ll need more than just good grades; you’ll also need flawless application because the competition is fierce. You may enlist the assistance of Leverage Edu specialists to assist you with the application process so that you can realise your goals. Call us immediately at 1800 57 2000 for a free 30-minute counselling session.

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Pursuing an ll.m. without a background in law.

Pursuing an LL.M. Without a Background in Law

A handful of LL.M. programs around the world offer non-law graduates the chance to learn about legal matters.

[See related article:  Juris Masters, MSLs and Beyond: Master of Laws Programs for Non-Law Graduates ]

Emma Sheffield studied international relations during her undergraduate degree, and she currently works in the field of genocide prevention. Specifically, she gathers testimony from and conducts interviews with Holocaust survivors.

But Sheffield hopes to work with survivors of contemporary genocides, and for that, she needs an understanding of international law.

"In order to go out and gather research in a field, it has to be able to stand up in court," Sheffield says. "That's a necessity these days. With the Holocaust, that angle is not so fierce, because obviously so much time has passed. It's a different mentality towards convictions now. Sooner or later the ICC [International Criminal Court] will try these people, for contemporary situations, and the evidence you're gathering needs to be able to stand up in tribunals."

That's why Sheffield is pursuing an LL.M. in Human Rights Law at the University of Nottingham, one of several schools that allow students with non-law backgrounds to pursue an LL.M.

Schools that accept students non-lawyers tend to place restrictions on the kind and number of non-legal students they accept.

For example, La Trobe University in Melbourne accepts students with a commercial background into its global business LL.M., while the University of Edinburgh accepts some history, international relations and politics students into its International Law LL.M.

St. Thomas University School of Law in Miami offers an Intercultural Human Rights LL.M. to teachers, activists and governmental workers, along with lawyers.

Other schools require that non-law students demonstrate an interest in law. Bucerius Law School in Hamburg offers a dual master's degree in business and law to students from any academic background, but applicants must first demonstrate their legal knowledge.

The European Master in Law and Economics (EMLE), an Erasmus program, accepts students with law and economics backgrounds, but will consider students with business administration or social science backgrounds provided that those students have taken classes in law and economics. London School of Economics requires non-law applicants to pass a conversion course to matriculate at their LL.M. program.

Officials at these schools say that students from non-law backgrounds choose to pursue LL.M.s for a variety of reasons.

"We probably have people from every degree program from the arts and humanities degrees during the LLM," says Sangeeta Shah, co-director of the University of Nottingham's LL.M. programs. "The most common degrees are history, journalism, politics and English, as well as people who have been out working in the world."

The University of Nottingham's programs tend to attract internationally-minded professionals who have worked for the United Nations or other governmental organizations, who want to learn the legal issues surrounding their chosen careers, as well as to make themselves more marketable.

Emma Sheffield says that in her career so far working in human rights, conflict and post-conflict, she constantly needs information about the law.

"For me it's invaluable. Just because you're not a lawyer doesn't mean that you don't have to deal with the law every day, all the time," Sheffield says.

Portsmouth University, which offers a general LL.M., an LL.M. in corporate governance and law, and, beginning in fall 2016, an LL.M. in alternative dispute resolution, tends to attract students from a different background: the business world.

"One big reason that we see is to gain a specialist expertise in a given professional area," says Joanne Atkinson, principal lecturer at Portsmouth. "For example, with the corporate governance masters, non-law grads tend to be people with a background in business or finance, or they're people who are already working in big organizations and want to take the next step up, and want to gain the accreditation that will allow them to proceed to the next stage in their career."

Portsmouth officials actively encourage non-law graduates from all walks of life to apply to their programs; these students simply must take a one-module law course upon matriculation into the program.

But officials from other schools often add stipulations to their policies on admitting non-law grads.

Sangeeta Shah says that Nottingham tends not to accept science students into LL.M. programs, since the degree relies heavily on essay writing and many students with a science background don't have as much writing experience. She also says the school tries to avoid accepting any non-law graduates into its commercial law LL.M. program.

Some schools don't accept non-law students into their LL.M. programs at all, but instead allow non-law students to apply to similar master's degrees. Jason Rudall, program manager of the Graduate Institute's LL.M. program in Geneva, says that his school will only accept law students into its LL.M., and that non-law students should instead pursue the Master in International Law or the Master in International Affairs, a program that allows students to complete a minor concentration in law.

Rudall also says that although the institute technically accepts non-law students into its Master in International Law, it has accepted fewer and fewer of these types of candidates in recent years.

"Applications have become stronger, as it were, and the quality has become better and numbers have increased, [so]we have been able to select students with a law background," Rudall says.

"It's been exceptional that students from a non-law background have been admitted to that program lately."

But despite these restrictions, officials also say that non-law students can often excel in LL.M. programs, and that they often enrich the classroom for other students as well.

"The ways that they improve the classroom is that they tend to be the students who think outside the box," Nottingham's Sangeeta Shah says. "They don't think in terms of rigid laws. They think, this is where I need to get, let me figure out how to do it. They tend to be creative thinkers. Not that law students aren't creative thinkers, but it just enriches the classroom. It makes it a better place."

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Research LLM

Osgoode’s Research LLM is a full-time, research-intensive program that is ideal for students who want to pursue a specific area of legal study in depth, including those who are considering a PhD. Students conduct their research under the supervision of an Osgoode faculty member .

The Research LLM does not qualify students to practise law in Canada. Students interested in practising law should review the licencing rules of the Law Society of the province in which they intend to practice.

Program Requirements

Graduate seminar i: legal research (gs law 6610).

  • One study group
  • Elective courses
  • A major written research work (thesis or major research paper)

The Graduate Seminar is the core course for the Graduate Program in Law. Designed to complement other courses, the seminar provides a venue for developing critical assessments of the law and facilitating students’ progress on their own research, papers and dissertation proposals. The seminar also provides students with an intellectual community and introduces them to Osgoode research resources.

One Study Group

Students participating in study groups read and discuss a significant number of articles with their groups each week. The groups are not structured as courses but as venues for reflection and discourse. LLM students must participate in one study group. They can choose among five options, depending on their research interests:

  • Regulation and Governance
  • Law and Economic Relations
  • Theoretical Perspectives in Legal Research
  • Law and Social Justice
  • Law in a Global Context

Elective Courses

Research LLM students can fulfil their elective courses through:

  • a variety of graduate courses in law
  • integrated courses with the JD program
  • independent study
  • courses in other programs

Major Written Research Work

A major paper is at the core of the Research LLM program. Most students complete a thesis, but students may also choose to submit a major research paper and complete additional coursework.

All theses and major research papers should contain an analysis of scholarship on the student’s chosen topic and the results of the student’s research – based on primary sources – in the form of a sustained argument. They should have standard scholarly apparatus, footnotes and a bibliography, prepared in accordance with the McGill Guide to Legal Citations.

Thesis Option

Major Research Paper (MRP) Option

100-125 pages

60-70 pages

Additional elective courses required to complete the LLM

Evaluation and defence

Students must succeed in an oral defence of their thesis before an examination committee.

MRPs are evaluated by the student’s supervisor and by one other member of the Graduate Program chosen by the supervisor in consultation with the Graduate Program Director. In exceptional circumstances, the second examiner may be a member of another Graduate Program at York University or another university.

Additional notes

Some students choose to fulfill the program’s thesis requirement with a Portfolio Thesis: one or two published articles (depending on length and scope) developed during their time in the Osgoode graduate degree, submitted in lieu of a traditional thesis.

The MRP is an original piece of scholarly work equivalent to an article of publishable quality for a reputable law journal. It’s typically more substantial than a research paper for a regular course, but less substantial than a thesis.

Additional Courses

Students entering the Research LLM without an LLB or JD may be required to take additional courses on the advice of their supervisor. Completing this extra coursework during their program can be helpful to students whose research relates to fields of law in which they do not have extensive background. The Graduate Program Director determines whether students must pursue additional courses in order to fulfill the requirements of the LLM.

Time to Completion

Both the Thesis and MRP options should be completed in three or four terms. Generally, students take courses in the fall and winter terms, conduct their research in the winter term and write the Thesis or MRP in the summer term. Graduate students must register in each term (fall, winter, summer) from the start of their program to completion.

Residency Requirement

Students must be located such that they are able to progress on all program requirements requiring geographical availability on campus.

More Detail:

Faculty research advisors, related topics:, funding and fees, intellectual life, meet our current doctoral students.

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Can You Get a PhD without a Masters?

  • Applying to a PhD

Yes, it’s possible to get a PhD without first having a Masters degree.

The conventional route for someone who earns a PhD is to pursue a Bachelor’s degree, followed by a Masters degree and then a PhD. However, several students opt to bypass a Master’s degree by enrolling onto a doctoral programme as soon as they complete their undergraduate degree.

Before we discuss how this can be done, it is worth mentioning the advantages and disadvantages of this route.

Advantages of Applying to a PhD without A Masters

The motivations for undertaking a PhD immediately after an undergraduate course are largely in saving money and time. This is because you will essentially eliminate a year of study. Another advantage of immediately enrolling onto a doctorate degree is project availability. If you find a project that you’re really interested in, it’s unlikely that it will still be available in a years’ time. Therefore, bypassing a Masters and enrolling directly into a PhD will increase your chances of securing the research project before it becomes unavailable.

Disadvantages of Applying to a PhD without A Masters

Although a Masters degree will add a year onto your academic journey, it can be incredibility helpful for your development and can help prepare you for a doctoral degree.

Not having a Master’s degree may prove to be a hindrance during your application process. This is because many other students will also apply to the same research projects, and it’s likely that the majority will hold a Masters. This will put you at a disadvantage to them.

Besides this, the dissertation project you’ll be required to undertake on a Master’s programme will provide you with a taste of what it is like to work on a research-based project. In addition to this, it’s likely that you’ll be able to select your own dissertation topic. As such, you can explore a specific field you’re interested in in further detail. This is a great way to confirm that both research-based work and the specific field you’re interested in are right for you before committing the next few years to it via a PhD.

Another advantage to the dissertation project associated with a Masters degree is the opportunity it provides you with to work closely with a project supervisor. This will help you understand the PhD student-supervisor relationship and communication frequency that works best for you. You can then use this knowledge to find supervisors who would compliment you when it comes time to find a PhD project to apply to. For tips on how to find a great PhD supervisor, check out our supervisor guide .

PhD without a Masters – How Does It Work?

To be considered for a PhD without a Master’s, at a minimum you will be expected to have a Bachelors degree. For students looking to enrol onto a STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths) PhD, a relevant Bachelors in a 3-year undergraduate course is usually expected. However, this is not the case for students looking to apply to non-STEM PhDs. Rather, students looking to apply to doctorates in subjects such as those surrounding Arts and Humanities are usually expected to have a relevant Bachelors from a 4-year course.

In addition to this, you will need to have demonstrated strong academic performance during your undergraduate course. This means that your Bachelors will need to be at least a UK Upper Second-Class Honours (2.1) for nearly all institutions to consider you.

Should you be accepted into a PhD programme without a Masters, the usual process will be to first register you as an MPhil student. You will then have a year to prepare and submit a thesis. Your thesis will need to detail the research you have carried out within that year and outline how you intend to continue it into a full PhD study. There are three outcomes of this MPhil thesis review:

  • Failure and you’re not awarded anything.
  • You pass, however, the supervisor doesn’t believe you’ve demonstrated strong research skills. You’re awarded an MPhil but they do not upgrade your course to a PhD programme.
  • You pass and the supervisor believes you have proven yourself as a capable researcher. Your course is upgraded to a PhD as opposed to you being awarding an MPhil.

For more information on these outcomes, read the outcomes section of our PhD Viva guide .

Integrated PhD

Some universities offer Integrated PhD degree programmes (also known as an Integrated Masters degree). These are four-year programmes comprising of a one-year Masters degree immediately followed by a three-year PhD degree. These can prove a great option for graduate students who are looking to undertake a PhD without a Masters but are struggling to meet the eligibility requirements. You can read about the many benefits of  integrated degrees here .

Finding a PhD has never been this easy – search for a PhD by keyword, location or academic area of interest.

PhD without a Bachelors – Is It Possible?

Yes, it is possible to get a PhD without a Bachelor’s, however, this is extremely uncommon.

When this occurs, it is almost always reserved for very mature individuals. For example, an individual may not be in active academia but still may have significantly contributed to their field. This contribution could be through the work they have undertaken as part of their career, or as part of a long-term study project, they have undertaken out of self-interest.

In either case, the individual would need to prove that they have extensive experience in their field and have directly contributed to new knowledge within it. The key factor here is that their work has pushed the boundaries of existing knowledge. It is not enough for an individual to be regarded as an expert in their field – they must have contributed something new and meaningful. It’s common for individuals awarded a PhD through this means to have produced several publications within their lifetime. It’s also common for the individual to have gained several professional accreditations within their field before even being considered suitable for a PhD research degree.

Universities Offering PhD without a Masters

Unfortunately, there is not a centralised list of universities which offer PhDs without a Master’s degree. The reason for this is that the edibility requirements differ from PhD to PhD and from department to department.

Therefore, you will need to check the guidelines for each individual university and the requirements for each specific PhD you’re interested in.

Should you find a PhD programme you can apply to with a Bachelors, make every effort to make your application as strong as possible. This is because you will be competing against other candidates, most of who will have a Master’s degree.

Not only can you strengthen your application by having a Bachelors with a First-Class Honours (1st), but you can also do so by showing the traits of a successful researcher. This includes showing a genuine interest in the project, a high work ethic, and exceptional communication skills.

Additionally, a strong letter of recommendation from a respected university lecturer will prove very beneficial. This is especially true if the lecturer supervisors his or her own PhD students. This is because the lecturer will understand the skills required for an adept research student.

For more advice on how to apply to a PhD degree, check out our Application Process Guide.

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Graduate Programs at the Schulich School of Law begin each September . There are NO Winter or Spring term admissions. 

Admission for September 2023 is CLOSED

Applications for September 2024 will open later this summer.

Be sure to apply online for September 2024 by:

  • December 1st - with funding consideration
  • February 15th - NO Funding consideration

Only applicants who have submitted ALL application documents by the deadline will be considered. You have 2 weeks from the above stated deadlines to submit application documents, though you can connect with the Administrative Coordinator earlier about document submission process.

Additional Scholarship Information

The Schulich School of Law has some scholarship money made available through endowments for graduate students. These funds are awarded by the Graduate Studies Committee. Taking the LLM on a part-time basis renders you ineligible for Schulich-specific financial support.

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Dalhousie University also has a number of awards potentially available to graduate students in law. They are managed through the  Harmonized Scholarship Process  which allows for a current/prospective student to be considered for several FGS-managed scholarships using a single application, including the  Nova Scotia Graduate Scholarship ,  Killam Predoctoral Scholarships ,  James Robinson Johnston Graduate Entrance Scholarship for African Canadians ,  African Nova Scotian Graduate Scholarship ,  Indigenous Graduate Scholarship ,   Vitamin Scholarship  and the  Abdul Majid Bader Graduate Scholarship .

All required application material must be submitted via the Online Scholarship Platform by December 15th , to be in line with the funded admission deadline.

For more information and to apply, please visit the  Faculty of Graduate Studies website.

Please note that obtaining an LLM or PhD from Dalhousie does not qualify students who do not have an LLB or JD from a Canadian university to practice law in Canada. International students who are interested in practising law in Canada should contact the  National Committee on Accreditation.

Our LLM is NOT compatible with the NCA requirements and can not be used as a method to achieve the required credentials to practice law in Nova Scotia/Canada.

Pursue a masters degree perfectly matched to your needs (LLM)

Our Master of Laws (LLM) degree, established in 1951, is diverse and deep. It can deliver the development you're looking for, whether your focus is intellectual property, broadcasting, tax, privacy, conflict prevention, the use of expert evidence, free trade, drug testing, the discipline of physicians or something else entirely.

LLM admission requirements

Candidates should have obtained high standing in an undergraduate or first law degree (LLB, JD or equivalent) passed with at least a 3.5 GPA. In exceptional circumstances we will accept for the coursework option candidates whose previous degree(s) are not in law but in cognate fields. The ability to conduct independent research and work easily in the English language is a prerequisite for admission.

Candidates from outside Canada whose native language is other than English will be required to pass an English language proficiency test (TOEFL, 600/250/100) (IELTS 7.5 or higher).

In an application package there should be TWO letters of reference, preferably from academic specialists in law who are familiar with your work and your scholarly capabilities.

For a full checklist, please visit our How to Apply webpage.

LLM program options

We offer two options for the LLM program . The first is a combination of a thesis plus three courses. The second is a program of six courses, all of which require substantial written research papers.

You may choose to do either of these options on a full-time (usually one year) or a part-time (usually two or more years) basis. Please note that taking the LLM on a part-time basis renders you ineligible for some potential financial support ( find out more about funding ).

Thesis option

Students usually complete the program's three courses during the first and second terms (September to April) of the academic year before undertaking a supervised thesis for the remainder of the year (May to August).

Coursework option

The coursework LLM option includes six courses (including directed research courses) that each conclude with a substantial written paper. This version of our LLM normally runs from September to May and is particularly appropriate for part-time students.

Before deciding on the thesis or coursework option , candidates who are contemplating future doctoral studies should note that some doctoral programs require the completion of a Master of Laws degree which includes a thesis. It should also be noted that some funding sources are only available to thesis stream students.

Both thesis and coursework LLM students are required to take the Graduate Seminar on Legal Education and Legal Scholarship ( LAWS 3010/3020 ).

LLM degree requirements

The Graduate Seminar on Legal Education and Legal Scholarship ( LAWS 3010/3020 ) is a required class for LLM students and is open to, and may be required for PhD students. This seminar is given in the Fall term and early part of the Winter term and requires from the student a comprehensive class presentation based on a substantial written paper.

Some students who have not had previous exposure to jurisprudence may be advised to take a jurisprudence course in addition.

If the degree is taken by thesis , a candidate is also required to:

(a) complete at least two one-term classes from the course offerings of the Schulich School of Law (the choice of classes to be determined by the Law Graduate Studies Committee); and (b) present a well-researched substantial thesis of scholarly quality produced under the supervision of a member (or members) of the law faculty.  Such a thesis would normally be 125-150 typescript pages in length (double-spaced).

Three copies of the thesis must be submitted to the supervisor on or before the dates established by the Faculty of Graduate Studies. The thesis requirements and regulations of the Faculty of Graduate Studies must be met. More information is available in the Graduate Handbook.  

If the degree is taken by coursework without a thesis , candidates are also required to take five one-term classes from the advanced coursework offerings of the Schulich School of Law considered to be suitable as graduate classes and seminars by the Law Graduate Studies Committee. Of those five classes, at least three must be designated as "major paper courses" by the Schulich School of Law, or be approved by the Graduate Studies Committee as having a substantial written component. At the discretion of the Graduate Studies Committee, a candidate may be required to submit to an oral examination by the committee or its nominees in the field of any written paper presented by the candidate. The Graduate Studies Committee may approve the substitution of not more than two seminars or graduate level classes in a discipline other than law, which may be highly relevant to the candidate's thesis topic or area of specialization, provided that any such substituted course or seminar has, in the opinion of the Committee, equivalence to the law classes being substituted.

In all courses, graduate students must receive a minimum mark of "B-" in order to pass.  No more than 3 courses  in which a student receives a B- grade will count towards the degree requirements.

Length of program

The degree may be taken on the basis of either one academic year (September 1 to August 31) of full-time studies at Dalhousie, or two academic years of part-time studies at Dalhousie, after registration for the LLM degree.

General requirements

A student is required to comply with the directions of the supervisor and the decisions of the Graduate Studies Committee, as well as the rules and regulations of the Faculty of Graduate Studies.

In exceptional circumstances, the Graduate Studies Committee of the Schulich School of Law may at any time require any candidate for the degree to show cause, in such manner as it may determine, why such candidate should be permitted to continue his or her candidacy.

Take a deep doctoral dive into your area of interest (PhD) 

We offer an advanced graduate program in law leading to the PhD (Doctor of Philosophy in Law) to a small number of highly qualified candidates.

PhD admission requirements

Applicants for admission to the PhD program must have demonstrated superior academic ability during their previous legal education. Normally it will be necessary to have:

(i) attained at least the equivalent of a Dalhousie A- (3.7 GPA) average at the JD level; and (ii) completed a Master's degree in law.

Preference will be given to applicants with established credentials in published scholarship of a professional calibre. This will often be reflected on tan applicant's CV .

The ability to conduct independent research and work easily in the English language is a prerequisite for admission. Candidates from outside Canada whose native language is other than English will be required to pass an English language proficiency test (TOEFL, 600/250/100) (IELTS 7.5 or higher).

A candidate may, at the discretion of the thesis committee, be required to pass a special examination designed to demonstrate the examinee's proficiency in a foreign language, statistical method, computer analysis, or other skill deemed to be important for successful completion of the candidate's thesis in the chosen area.

In applying for admission, an applicant must submit a preliminary Thesis Proposal (maximum approximately 3,000 words). The Proposal should outline the proposed research, address existing literature in the area and methodological and theoretical approaches which will be employed. The Proposal should be sufficient to enable the Graduate Studies Committee to assess the suitability of the topic for development of the doctoral thesis, as well as the availability of supervisory resources and the capability of the applicant to undertake the project.

PhD residency requirement

Applicants must spend at least one full academic year (12 months) in full-time residence at Dalhousie after registration for the PhD program. The Graduate Studies Committee of the Schulich School of Law reserves the right in certain cases to require the completion of a second year of residency. It is to be noted, however, that consistent with other doctoral programs at Dalhousie University, PhD candidates must pay fees at the full-time rate for two years regardless of whether they have been required to spend a second year in residence at Dalhousie.

PhD pre-thesis requirements

Candidates for the PhD degree may be required by the Graduate Studies Committee of the Schulich School of Law, on the recommendation of their thesis committee, to carry out advanced course work in the area of their thesis, or in a cognate area of a more general field of law, or in a discipline other than law, which is deemed to be highly relevant to their thesis topic. 

All requirements must be completed with no grade below B- . A student who fails to meet this requirement is automatically dropped from the program, but may apply for readmission.

PhD thesis requirements

The primary requirement for the PhD degree is the completion of a substantial thesis which should not only display original scholarship of a high standard, but also represent a significant contribution to the literature of the chosen subject. Normally, a PhD thesis should be between 350 and 500 typescript pages in length (double-spaced).

In applying for admission, an applicant is required to satisfy the Graduate Studies Committee of the Schulich School of Law that the suggested topic is suitable for development as a doctoral thesis.

After an applicant has been accepted, a thesis committee consisting of a supervisor and two advisors will be appointed by the Graduate Studies Committee of the Schulich School of Law. All candidates are required to comply with the decisions of their thesis committees.

The Faculty of Graduate Studies requires that the completed PhD thesis be submitted to the Graduate Studies Committee within six years of the date of original registration in the program. Submission of the thesis must follow the rules and regulations laid down by the Faculty of Graduate Studies.

Each PhD candidate is required to defend the completed thesis in an oral examination . This defence shall be conducted in accordance with the Faculty of Graduate Studies Regulations for Oral Examination of a Doctoral Candidate.

PhD teaching activities

The Graduate Studies Committee of the Schulich School of Law may give permission to a PhD candidate to engage in teaching activities during the period of residency, if such activities are deemed to fall within the field of the candidate's thesis topic. Under no circumstances shall any full-time PhD candidate be permitted to spend more than six hours per week in teaching activities and related preparations.

Schulich School of Law at Dalhousie University Weldon Law Building 6061 University Avenue  PO Box 15000 Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada  B3H 4R2 t:  902.494.3495   e:  [email protected]

JD/Combined Degree Admissions :  [email protected] Graduate Programs in Law Admissions : [email protected]

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The Ph.D (Law) programme offers candidates an opportunity to contribute to the academic field in their chosen areas of study. ​As a part of the programme, candidates are also provided an opportunity to teach or participate in ongoing research at NLSIU, in areas related to their dissertation, allowing for deeper integration with the NLSIU community and providing diverse feedback opportunities.

Related Videos

Watch videos on the programme here .

Eligibility for Ph.D. (Law)

The following candidates shall be eligible to apply for the Ph.D. (Law) programme:

a) Candidates having a 5-year/ 10-semester/ 15-trimester bachelor’s degree programme in Law through regular mode from a recognized University having secured a minimum of 75% marks in aggregate or its equivalent grade on a point scale wherever the grading system is followed (70% of marks or its equivalent grade in case of SC/ST/OBC- NCL/Persons with Disability.)

b) Candidates having a 3-year/ 6-semester/ 9-trimester bachelor’s degree programme in Law (LL.B.) through regular mode from a recognized University having secured a minimum of 75% marks in aggregate or its equivalent grade on a point scale wherever the grading system is followed (70% of marks or its equivalent grade in case of SC/ST/OBC-NCL Persons with Disability); and

c) Candidates having a Masters in Law degree (LL.M.) through regular mode from a recognized University having secured an aggregate of at least 55% marks or its equivalent grade (50% of marks or its equivalent grade in case of SC/ST/OBC-NCL)/ Persons with Disability);

d) Candidates having passed the Solicitors Examination conducted by the Bombay Incorporated Law Society and having a completed a bachelor’s in Law (LL.B./LL.B. (Hons.)) degree from a recognized University through regular mode; or

(e) Candidates having a Master of Business Laws (MBL) degree from the National Law School of India University with minimum CGPA (Cumulative Grade Point Average) of 4.00 and having completed a bachelor’s degree from a recognized University through regular mode.

Provided that candidates in their final year of study in the respective degrees in (a), (b) and (c) shall be eligible to apply, subject to the candidate securing the minimum marks or equivalent grade prior to July 2024.

International Students

Candidates can apply for the NLSAT – International Examination for “international student” category, if they fulfil the following conditions:

  • They should be a citizen of a country other than India; AND
  • They should have completed a minimum of ten years of their education in a school/college/university outside India.

For more details, click here.

Admission Process

Admission to the programme will be through an all-India written admissions test, the National Law School Admissions Test (NLSAT-PhD). Candidates shall submit the application form duly filled up along with a research proposal of about 6-8 pages. The application form is available here.

The research proposal should contain: i. Tentative Title ii. Statement of the problem and the background information on the subject. iii. A brief outline of the research design including a set of research questions, a brief review of the relevant literature on the issue identified for research, a research hypothesis (where applicable) and the proposed methodology. Students who demonstrate a firm grasp of these foundational issues will be awarded higher marks.

The NLSAT-PhD shall have the following scheme: a) Research Aptitude: 50 marks b) Essays/Answers on relevant topics pertaining to law/ other disciplines: 50 marks

Candidates securing not less than 50% marks on the aggregate in the written test will qualify for evaluation of their Research Proposal and making an oral presentation before a Panel of Experts on the date specified by the University.

Selection Process

Candidates will be selected based on the marks obtained by the candidate in the NLSAT- PhD, the research proposal, and the oral presentation. The weightage of each score component shall be as follows:

a) NLSAT-PhD: 50% b) Research Proposal: 35% c) Oral Presentation: 15%

Important Dates

  • The National Law School Admissions Test-PhD (NLSAT-PhD) will be held on March 17, 2024 (Sunday), from 10.00 am to 12.30 pm in specified centres across the country. The duration of the test shall be 150 minutes.
  • Application deadline has been extended to 11:59 pm IST, on February 28, 2024. View official notification. An application fee of Rs. 3000/- (Rupees Three Thousand Only) shall be payable at the time of submission of the application.
  • The dates for the oral presentation shall be announced after the completion of the NLSAT-PhD. They are likely to be held in April – May 2024.
  • Classes for coursework component of the Ph.D. programme shall commence in the University in July 2024.

The maximum number of Ph. D seats for the Academic Year 2024-25 are 8 (Eight). This includes 4 in Ph.D (Law) and 4 in Ph.D (Interdisciplinary). The University reserves the right not to fill all the seats where sufficient candidates do not satisfy the admission requirements.

PhD Regulations

Regulations governing the PhD programme are available here.  Candidates should familiarize themselves with the requirements of the programme, before applying.

The admission notification for AY 2024-25 is available here.

For Indian Nationals

For international students.

The total amount payable at the time of admission by foreign students for AY 2024-25 is Rs. 2,55,000/- as provided below:

Registration Fee – one time 90,000/- Course Work Fee – one time 90,000/- Annual Fee 75,000/- Total fee – per annum 2,55,000/-

* Fees mentioned above are provisional and subject to ratification by the University Governing Bodies.

Sample questions for NLSAT 2024 will be released to candidates who have registered through the admissions portal prior to the admissions test.

The University’s PhD programme in the previous year was offered in terms of the Ph.D. Degree Programme Regulations, 2021. The Regulations have been revised since the Academic Year 2023-24. 

The FAQs below reflect the Ph.D. Degree Programme Regulations 2023.  

NLSIU currently offers two Ph.D programmes:

– The Ph.D. (Law) programme allows a candidate to contribute academically in the field of law; – The Ph.D. (Interdisciplinary) involves research across disciplines to arrive at a more comprehensive perspective and solution for a particular problem.

Yes, they may apply for the Ph.D (Law) programme.

a) Candidates having a 5-year/ 10-semester/ 15-trimester bachelor’s degree programme in Law through regular mode from a recognized University having secured a minimum of 75% marks in aggregate or its equivalent grade on a point scale wherever the grading system is followed (70% of marks or its equivalent grade in case of SC/ST/OBC- NCL/Persons with Disability.)

b) Candidates having a 3-year/ 6-semester/ 9-trimester bachelor’s degree programme in Law (LL.B.) through regular mode from a recognized University having secured a minimum of 75% marks in aggregate or its equivalent grade on a point scale wherever the grading system is followed (70% of marks or its equivalent grade in case of SC/ST/OBC-NCL Persons with Disability); and

Provided that candidates in their final year of study in the respective degrees in (a), (b) and (c) shall be eligible to apply, subject to the candidate securing the minimum marks or equivalent grade prior to the date of the commencement of Ph.D.

No, there is no age limit to apply for the programmes.

Candidates will have to appear for the admission test NLSAT – Ph.D, conducted by the University. To apply, visit admissions.nls.ac.in

Note: While submitting the application for the admission test, candidates should also submit a research proposal of about 6-8 pages. The research proposal should contain: i. Tentative Title ii. Statement of the problem and the background information on the subject. iii. A brief outline of the research design including a set of research questions, a brief review of the relevant literature on the issue identified for research, a research hypothesis (where applicable) and the proposed methodology. Students who demonstrate a firm grasp of these foundational issues will be awarded higher marks.

No. Candidates may apply for either Ph.D (Law) or the Ph.D (Interdisciplinary) programme.

To apply for the Ph.D programmes, visit admissions.nls.ac.in

The University shall conduct a written test (NLSAT-Ph.D) along the following scheme:

a) Research Aptitude – 50 marks b) Essays on relevant topics pertaining to law/ other disciplines – 50 marks 

The list of selected candidates as above shall be displayed on the NLSIU website.

Candidates are required to be present at the NLSIU campus for the duration of their coursework spread over three trimesters. Course work is compulsory for all the Ph.D. candidates.

The first component of the course work must be completed during the first trimester upon their admission. The remaining two trimesters of the course work needs to be completed within the first two academic years.  

a) The candidate will have to complete a minimum of three (3) years’ research in their chosen subject, including the mandatory course work as provided in these Regulations.

b) Maximum period: The maximum duration of the Ph.D. programme shall be six (6) years* from the date of admission in the Ph.D. programme, subject to the fulfilment of the requirements per the Regulations.

*- Provided that candidates who are Persons with Disabilities (having more than 40% disability) may be allowed a relaxation of upto two (2) years; however, the total period for completion of a Ph.D. programme in such cases should not exceed eight (8) years from the date of admission in the Ph.D. programme; – Provided further that female Ph.D. candidates may be provided Maternity Leave/ Child Care Leave for up to 240 days in the entire duration of the Ph.D. programme; however, the total period for completion of a Ph.D. programme in such cases should not exceed six (6) years and eight (8) months from the date of admission in the Ph.D. programme.

c) Failure to complete the course within the maximum period set out in point (b) above will automatically result in cancellation of registration.

There are a total of six courses that a doctoral candidate has to complete. Three of these are compulsory taught courses. Each taught course will extend for around 10 weeks and will be held on campus.

The first compulsory taught course is to be completed in the initial trimester on admission to the programme. The second compulsory taught course can be completed in the initial or any subsequent trimester (depending on when the course is offered). These two taught courses have to be completed prior to the first presentation before the Research Advisory Committee. In addition, there are also two course requirements relating to review of literature and fine-tuning of the proposal which need to be completed under the guidance of the Supervisor prior to the first presentation before the Research Advisory Committee.

The third compulsory taught course has to be completed prior to the second presentation before the Research Advisory Committee. In addition, candidates also will also need to complete the course requirement relating to teaching/research assistantships as will be decided by the Supervisor/relevant University body of the University.

There is a Research Advisory Committee for each Ph.D. scholar consisting of a Supervisor and two members (one from within NLSIU and one external member).

Please refer to the fee tab on the respective programme pages for fee details. 

Yes, the University will release sample questions at a later date.

We do not offer rolling admissions to the PhD programme. New students are admitted once a year, to begin studying at the start of the Academic Year in July.

Yes, but only in the next academic year. Candidates will have to appear for the NLSAT after applying for the programme in any given year.  

Yes. The University will notify a ‘Campus Open Day’ for you to visit us and familiarize yourself with the campus before applying for any programme through the NLSAT. Follow our website for further updates.

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LLM PhD Integrated Course, Eligibility, Admission, Syllabus, Subjects, Scope & Career Growth

  • What is LLM Ph.D.?

LLM Ph.D. is an integrated dual degree course. It combines postgraduate-level LLM and doctoral Ph.D. programmes. LLM PhD dual degree can be pursued by students who come from different academic backgrounds. It is one of the best ways to develop the right amount of knowledge in the field of law. As people are becoming aware of their legal rights and responsibilities, the demand for law courses has increased among students. There are numerous specialisations offered in law courses such as international business law, patent law, civil law , human rights law, corporate law , and labour law .

What is the LLM PhD Full Form?

Highlights - master of legislative law- doctor of philosophy (llm phd), llm phd fee structure, why choose llm phd, llm phd eligibility, skills required for llm phd degree, llm phd application process, llm phd cutoff, top law colleges accepting clat pg score, llm phd syllabus, llm phd specialisations, what after llm phd, careers opportunities after llm phd, top recruiters for llm phd, salary after llm phd, llm phd employing areas.

The LLM course can be completed in one year, and from then onwards, you can start your Ph.D . The PhD after LLM duration will be of three to four years. A lot of people consider LLM to be the degree that you need to do if you are looking to teach a student in college or if you want to pursue a Ph.D. You need to keep reading the article to know more about this integrated PhD after LLM programme.

LLM PhD stands for Master of Legislative Law- Doctor of Philosophy. The Ph.D. topic depends on what subjects you have chosen in your LLM. The Ph.D. in legal studies helps students understand the advanced legal system of the country and the different policies that come into play to make juridical decisions. A candidate who is applying for an LLM course must be keen to study law and the various niches that the law offers.

The fee structure of the LLM PhD integrated course is planned by the management authority of the academic institution. It may vary across colleges, depending on the facilities provided and previous academic records. The average LLM PhD fees range from Rs. 2 lakhs to Rs. 6.3 lakhs, based on the college choice.

The LLM PhD joint degree is suitable for all professionals. Whether you are a lawyer or a non-lawyer, it does not matter. LLM PhD dual degree is well recognised internationally and will stand the test of time. The masters of law are not only for lawyers who fight their cases in the courtroom. People in industrial business, academia, marketing, international diplomacy, and administration are some of the different opportunities in which you can kickstart your career with this master’s degree.

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Every institute has its own eligibility criteria for the integrated LLM PhD course. we have provided you with the basic LLM PhD eligibility that every law school demands from the students.

  • First, a student must have done a bachelor's in law or have some kind of degree in law, which could be either a BA LLB or BBA LLB from a recognised university or college.
  • Some colleges may have a higher minimum percentage when it comes to the admission process in LLM. But for most law schools, a minimum of 55 per cent of previous bachelors is required.
  • When it comes to the age limit, there is no specified age to take LLM courses in various colleges in the country. You only need to complete your graduation to pursue LLM.

For a person to pursue a PhD in law after LLM , one needs to have a good observational trait to look for even the smallest details. Also, they should be good at interpersonal skills and should be comfortable in running the debate. Below are some LLM PhD skills helpful to the students throughout the course.

Suppose you are interested in doing your LLM course along with a Ph.D. You need to make sure that you apply to all the top law schools that are present in the country. Also, when you are pursuing LLM, you need to take a specialisation in it. Below is the general LLM PhD application process followed at most colleges in India.

  • Candidates who want to get admission to the LLM course first need to appear for the national entrance exams. To get admission to the top law schools that the nation has to offer.
  • Once you have filled out the application form for the LLM course entrance test, you need to appear in the exam and score good marks. After the result is out, colleges will have their cut-off for the respective entrance exams, and you can apply for those colleges whose cut-off you have cleared.
  • After applying to college, you need to visit the campus for the final interview round, where the administration will ask you a general question and test your verbal skills.
  • Now, if you are selected for the college, you will start your LLM course and during those 12 months, you can choose the topic for your Ph.D. and submit a draft to the college.
  • Also, if you are interested in combining LLM courses along with a Ph.D., the whole admission process is the same. But, candidates also need to provide the working experience certificate, which needs to be off at least three to five years.

A cut-off is the minimum required score that determines the eligibility of candidates to offer enrollment in academic programmes. It is affected by three major factors: the number of candidates participating in the examination, the number of available seats, and the difficulty level of the examination. It is difficult to predict the LLM PhD cutoff, as it changes every year. Candidates are advised to check the college's websites for the publication of the LLM PhD cutoff.

The Common Law Admission Test-Postgraduate ( CLAT-PG) is an offline test at the national level that provides admission to various law-related courses. Across the country, there are many colleges and universities that accept CLAT-PG scores to provide admission. Below are some of the top colleges accepting CLAT PG scorecards.

There are several different LLM PhD subjects and specialisations, that you can choose when you are pursuing the course. Depending on your specialisation, the LLM PhD syllabus will be different for each course. Below is the LLM PhD curriculum which is followed at the Auro University, Surat .

LLM PhD dual degree course allows students to learn new different core subjects, which can help in building a good law career. Given below are some of the law specialisations which you should be looking for when you apply for the LLM PhD integrated course.

  • Business Law
  • Criminal Law
  • Human Rights
  • Taxation Law

There are a number of opportunities open up for you once you complete your LLM Ph.D. LLM courses will bring both respect and money into your life. There are a lot of public areas where the government needs an LLM course candidate to help them out. Graduates can work for the government as well as private organisations. Moreover, they can also open up their own consultancy or legal aid firm and become an entrepreneur. Pursuing a career as an academician is another choice you can opt for.

Given below, we have named some career options that you can choose after completing your LLM with an integrated Ph.D. Here is the list of LLM PhD career options that you can choose that can easily provide both social respect and a respectable annual salary.

Advocate :- You can have a great career both in India and abroad when it comes to becoming an advocate. You will be able to showcase your knowledge of Indian law. To succeed in this line, you need to have an astute for human behaviour and psychology.

Lawyer : A lawyer is a professional who practices law. He or she provided advice to clients on legal matters. He or she may advocate and represent clients in the courts. A lawyer interprets the legal terms to clients and interprets laws, rulings, and regulations for individuals and businesses. He or she conducts case studies and prepares legal documents.

Legal Advisor :- A legal consultant or legal advisor helps the company sign a legal contract with the new companies or with the new client. It requires you to have legitimate research, drafting, and research related to your company's projects.

Judge :- One of the highly reputed jobs in India can be taken up if you have completed your LLM PhD course. Surely you need to take an exam for that, but this course will help you prepare for it, and during the interview stage the postgraduate degree with a Ph.D. is going to help you pass the process with flying colours.

Several recruiters hire individuals with legal expertise directly through campus placements. These recruiters visit the campuses of premier law colleges like ICFAI Law School, Hyderabad , Saveetha University, Chennai , and RNB Global University, Bikaner . Some of the notable recruiters for LLM PhD courses are provided in the table below.

We have provided below the salary details based on the law career job profiles. The salary offered to LLM PhD graduates may vary depending on their job profile and area of law specialisation and the structure of the employing organisation.

Source: Payscale

An LLM PhD is a higher level of qualification in the field of legal studies. Successful LLM PhD graduates can become law professors and start teaching in law colleges and universities. They can either start working with NGOs, media houses, NPOs, legal firms, or in the court of law. Note that, specific employment areas depend on the individual's specialisation, preference, and experience.

Frequently Asked Question (FAQs)

To get admission in LLM, you need to have a bachelor's in the same field, which is a legal study. You can get admission to LLM course postgraduate courses in some colleges. Still, top law schools require you to have previous experience in the field or a graduate degree.

Yes, when you enrol in an LLM course you have to choose a specialisation for your postgraduate. During this decision-making, you can choose criminal law, or family law as your specialisation. These will help you learn the core concepts of Indian law which will be beneficial for you in the long term when you need to represent your client in court. 

You need to have work experience in this field and your bachelors have to be related to legal studies in one way or the other. 

There are certain exceptions that can go beyond one year of the time period but mostly LLM course full-time programmes take one year to complete. Some schools do offer part-time and distance learning to their students so that LLM course can be done in two to three years depending on the law school. 

Yes. You will need three or more years to complete LLM Ph.D. In this programme, a student needs to choose a topic for the research and come up with the solution and thesis along with the published paper at the end of the final year to complete the programme. LLM course is a postgraduate degree in law. 

Yes, candidates can pursue an LLM PhD integrated course of four years. Note that, they must have a bachelor’s degree in law first.

Yes, you can apply for Ph.D. programme after one year of LLM, but make sure you have pursued LLM in full-time mode, otherwise, your application may not be considered.

Most colleges cover LLM PhD courses in four years, however, it can take up to five years as well, depending on the curriculum and specialisation.

The application process involves meeting educational requirements, appearing for an entrance exam (if any), and appearing for an interview.

No, there is no national-level exam for the LLM PhD integrated course.

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Natural language boosts LLM performance in coding, planning, and robotics

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Three boxes demonstrate different tasks assisted by natural language. One is a rectangle showing colorful lines of code with a white speech bubble highlighting an abstraction; another is a pale 3D kitchen, and another is a robotic quadruped dropping a can into a trash bin.

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Large language models (LLMs) are becoming increasingly useful for programming and robotics tasks, but for more complicated reasoning problems, the gap between these systems and humans looms large. Without the ability to learn new concepts like humans do, these systems fail to form good abstractions — essentially, high-level representations of complex concepts that skip less-important details — and thus sputter when asked to do more sophisticated tasks. Luckily, MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) researchers have found a treasure trove of abstractions within natural language. In three papers to be presented at the International Conference on Learning Representations this month, the group shows how our everyday words are a rich source of context for language models, helping them build better overarching representations for code synthesis, AI planning, and robotic navigation and manipulation. The three separate frameworks build libraries of abstractions for their given task: LILO (library induction from language observations) can synthesize, compress, and document code; Ada (action domain acquisition) explores sequential decision-making for artificial intelligence agents; and LGA (language-guided abstraction) helps robots better understand their environments to develop more feasible plans. Each system is a neurosymbolic method, a type of AI that blends human-like neural networks and program-like logical components. LILO: A neurosymbolic framework that codes Large language models can be used to quickly write solutions to small-scale coding tasks, but cannot yet architect entire software libraries like the ones written by human software engineers. To take their software development capabilities further, AI models need to refactor (cut down and combine) code into libraries of succinct, readable, and reusable programs. Refactoring tools like the previously developed MIT-led Stitch algorithm can automatically identify abstractions, so, in a nod to the Disney movie “Lilo & Stitch,” CSAIL researchers combined these algorithmic refactoring approaches with LLMs. Their neurosymbolic method LILO uses a standard LLM to write code, then pairs it with Stitch to find abstractions that are comprehensively documented in a library. LILO’s unique emphasis on natural language allows the system to do tasks that require human-like commonsense knowledge, such as identifying and removing all vowels from a string of code and drawing a snowflake. In both cases, the CSAIL system outperformed standalone LLMs, as well as a previous library learning algorithm from MIT called DreamCoder, indicating its ability to build a deeper understanding of the words within prompts. These encouraging results point to how LILO could assist with things like writing programs to manipulate documents like Excel spreadsheets, helping AI answer questions about visuals, and drawing 2D graphics.

“Language models prefer to work with functions that are named in natural language,” says Gabe Grand SM '23, an MIT PhD student in electrical engineering and computer science, CSAIL affiliate, and lead author on the research. “Our work creates more straightforward abstractions for language models and assigns natural language names and documentation to each one, leading to more interpretable code for programmers and improved system performance.”

When prompted on a programming task, LILO first uses an LLM to quickly propose solutions based on data it was trained on, and then the system slowly searches more exhaustively for outside solutions. Next, Stitch efficiently identifies common structures within the code and pulls out useful abstractions. These are then automatically named and documented by LILO, resulting in simplified programs that can be used by the system to solve more complex tasks.

The MIT framework writes programs in domain-specific programming languages, like Logo, a language developed at MIT in the 1970s to teach children about programming. Scaling up automated refactoring algorithms to handle more general programming languages like Python will be a focus for future research. Still, their work represents a step forward for how language models can facilitate increasingly elaborate coding activities. Ada: Natural language guides AI task planning Just like in programming, AI models that automate multi-step tasks in households and command-based video games lack abstractions. Imagine you’re cooking breakfast and ask your roommate to bring a hot egg to the table — they’ll intuitively abstract their background knowledge about cooking in your kitchen into a sequence of actions. In contrast, an LLM trained on similar information will still struggle to reason about what they need to build a flexible plan. Named after the famed mathematician Ada Lovelace, who many consider the world’s first programmer, the CSAIL-led “Ada” framework makes headway on this issue by developing libraries of useful plans for virtual kitchen chores and gaming. The method trains on potential tasks and their natural language descriptions, then a language model proposes action abstractions from this dataset. A human operator scores and filters the best plans into a library, so that the best possible actions can be implemented into hierarchical plans for different tasks. “Traditionally, large language models have struggled with more complex tasks because of problems like reasoning about abstractions,” says Ada lead researcher Lio Wong, an MIT graduate student in brain and cognitive sciences, CSAIL affiliate, and LILO coauthor. “But we can combine the tools that software engineers and roboticists use with LLMs to solve hard problems, such as decision-making in virtual environments.”

When the researchers incorporated the widely-used large language model GPT-4 into Ada, the system completed more tasks in a kitchen simulator and Mini Minecraft than the AI decision-making baseline “Code as Policies.” Ada used the background information hidden within natural language to understand how to place chilled wine in a cabinet and craft a bed. The results indicated a staggering 59 and 89 percent task accuracy improvement, respectively. With this success, the researchers hope to generalize their work to real-world homes, with the hopes that Ada could assist with other household tasks and aid multiple robots in a kitchen. For now, its key limitation is that it uses a generic LLM, so the CSAIL team wants to apply a more powerful, fine-tuned language model that could assist with more extensive planning. Wong and her colleagues are also considering combining Ada with a robotic manipulation framework fresh out of CSAIL: LGA (language-guided abstraction). Language-guided abstraction: Representations for robotic tasks Andi Peng SM ’23, an MIT graduate student in electrical engineering and computer science and CSAIL affiliate, and her coauthors designed a method to help machines interpret their surroundings more like humans, cutting out unnecessary details in a complex environment like a factory or kitchen. Just like LILO and Ada, LGA has a novel focus on how natural language leads us to those better abstractions. In these more unstructured environments, a robot will need some common sense about what it’s tasked with, even with basic training beforehand. Ask a robot to hand you a bowl, for instance, and the machine will need a general understanding of which features are important within its surroundings. From there, it can reason about how to give you the item you want. 

In LGA’s case, humans first provide a pre-trained language model with a general task description using natural language, like “bring me my hat.” Then, the model translates this information into abstractions about the essential elements needed to perform this task. Finally, an imitation policy trained on a few demonstrations can implement these abstractions to guide a robot to grab the desired item. Previous work required a person to take extensive notes on different manipulation tasks to pre-train a robot, which can be expensive. Remarkably, LGA guides language models to produce abstractions similar to those of a human annotator, but in less time. To illustrate this, LGA developed robotic policies to help Boston Dynamics’ Spot quadruped pick up fruits and throw drinks in a recycling bin. These experiments show how the MIT-developed method can scan the world and develop effective plans in unstructured environments, potentially guiding autonomous vehicles on the road and robots working in factories and kitchens.

“In robotics, a truth we often disregard is how much we need to refine our data to make a robot useful in the real world,” says Peng. “Beyond simply memorizing what’s in an image for training robots to perform tasks, we wanted to leverage computer vision and captioning models in conjunction with language. By producing text captions from what a robot sees, we show that language models can essentially build important world knowledge for a robot.” The challenge for LGA is that some behaviors can’t be explained in language, making certain tasks underspecified. To expand how they represent features in an environment, Peng and her colleagues are considering incorporating multimodal visualization interfaces into their work. In the meantime, LGA provides a way for robots to gain a better feel for their surroundings when giving humans a helping hand. 

An “exciting frontier” in AI

“Library learning represents one of the most exciting frontiers in artificial intelligence, offering a path towards discovering and reasoning over compositional abstractions,” says assistant professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison Robert Hawkins, who was not involved with the papers. Hawkins notes that previous techniques exploring this subject have been “too computationally expensive to use at scale” and have an issue with the lambdas, or keywords used to describe new functions in many languages, that they generate. “They tend to produce opaque 'lambda salads,' big piles of hard-to-interpret functions. These recent papers demonstrate a compelling way forward by placing large language models in an interactive loop with symbolic search, compression, and planning algorithms. This work enables the rapid acquisition of more interpretable and adaptive libraries for the task at hand.” By building libraries of high-quality code abstractions using natural language, the three neurosymbolic methods make it easier for language models to tackle more elaborate problems and environments in the future. This deeper understanding of the precise keywords within a prompt presents a path forward in developing more human-like AI models. MIT CSAIL members are senior authors for each paper: Joshua Tenenbaum, a professor of brain and cognitive sciences, for both LILO and Ada; Julie Shah, head of the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics, for LGA; and Jacob Andreas, associate professor of electrical engineering and computer science, for all three. The additional MIT authors are all PhD students: Maddy Bowers and Theo X. Olausson for LILO, Jiayuan Mao and Pratyusha Sharma for Ada, and Belinda Z. Li for LGA. Muxin Liu of Harvey Mudd College was a coauthor on LILO; Zachary Siegel of Princeton University, Jaihai Feng of the University of California at Berkeley, and Noa Korneev of Microsoft were coauthors on Ada; and Ilia Sucholutsky, Theodore R. Sumers, and Thomas L. Griffiths of Princeton were coauthors on LGA.  LILO and Ada were supported, in part, by ​​MIT Quest for Intelligence, the MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab, Intel, U.S. Air Force Office of Scientific Research, the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, and the U.S. Office of Naval Research, with the latter project also receiving funding from the Center for Brains, Minds and Machines. LGA received funding from the U.S. National Science Foundation, Open Philanthropy, the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada, and the U.S. Department of Defense.

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Natural language boosts LLM performance in coding, planning and robotics

by Alex Shipps, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Natural language boosts LLM performance in coding, planning and robotics

Large language models (LLMs) are becoming increasingly useful for programming and robotics tasks, but for more complicated reasoning problems, the gap between these systems and humans looms large. Without the ability to learn new concepts like humans do, these systems fail to form good abstractions—essentially, high-level representations of complex concepts that skip less-important details—and thus sputter when asked to do more sophisticated tasks.

Luckily, MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) researchers have found a treasure trove of abstractions within natural language. In three papers to be presented at the International Conference on Learning Representations this month, the group shows how our everyday words are a rich source of context for language models, helping them build better overarching representations for code synthesis, AI planning, and robotic navigation and manipulation. All three papers are also available on the arXiv preprint server.

The three separate frameworks build libraries of abstractions for their given task: LILO (library induction from language observations) can synthesize, compress, and document code; Ada (action domain acquisition) explores sequential decision-making for artificial intelligence agents; and LGA (language-guided abstraction) helps robots better understand their environments to develop more feasible plans. Each system is a neurosymbolic method, a type of AI that blends human-like neural networks and program-like logical components.

LILO: A neurosymbolic framework that codes

Large language models can be used to quickly write solutions to small-scale coding tasks, but cannot yet architect entire software libraries like the ones written by human software engineers. To take their software development capabilities further, AI models need to refactor (cut down and combine) code into libraries of succinct, readable, and reusable programs.

Refactoring tools like the previously developed MIT-led Stitch algorithm can automatically identify abstractions, so, in a nod to the Disney movie "Lilo & Stitch," CSAIL researchers combined these algorithmic refactoring approaches with LLMs. Their neurosymbolic method LILO uses a standard LLM to write code, then pairs it with Stitch to find abstractions that are comprehensively documented in a library.

LILO's unique emphasis on natural language allows the system to do tasks that require human-like common sense knowledge, such as identifying and removing all vowels from a string of code and drawing a snowflake. In both cases, the CSAIL system outperformed standalone LLMs, as well as a previous library learning algorithm from MIT called DreamCoder, indicating its ability to build a deeper understanding of the words within prompts.

These encouraging results point to how LILO could assist with things like writing programs to manipulate documents like Excel spreadsheets, helping AI answer questions about visuals, and drawing 2D graphics.

"Language models prefer to work with functions that are named in natural language," says Gabe Grand, an MIT Ph.D. student in electrical engineering and computer science, CSAIL affiliate, and lead author on the research. "Our work creates more straightforward abstractions for language models and assigns natural language names and documentation to each one, leading to more interpretable code for programmers and improved system performance."

When prompted on a programming task, LILO first uses an LLM to quickly propose solutions based on data it was trained on, and then the system slowly searches more exhaustively for outside solutions. Next, Stitch efficiently identifies common structures within the code and pulls out useful abstractions. These are then automatically named and documented by LILO, resulting in simplified programs that can be used by the system to solve more complex tasks.

The MIT framework writes programs in domain-specific programming languages, like Logo, a language developed at MIT in the 1970s to teach children about programming. Scaling up automated refactoring algorithms to handle more general programming languages like Python will be a focus for future research. Still, their work represents a step forward for how language models can facilitate increasingly elaborate coding activities.

Ada: Natural language guides AI task planning

Just like in programming, AI models that automate multi-step tasks in households and command-based video games lack abstractions. Imagine you're cooking breakfast and ask your roommate to bring a hot egg to the table—they'll intuitively abstract their background knowledge about cooking in your kitchen into a sequence of actions. In contrast, an LLM trained on similar information will still struggle to reason about what they need to build a flexible plan.

Named after the famed mathematician Ada Lovelace, who many consider the world's first programmer, the CSAIL-led "Ada" framework makes headway on this issue by developing libraries of useful plans for virtual kitchen chores and gaming. The method trains on potential tasks and their natural language descriptions, then a language model proposes action abstractions from this dataset. A human operator scores and filters the best plans into a library, so that the best possible actions can be implemented into hierarchical plans for different tasks.

"Traditionally, large language models have struggled with more complex tasks because of problems like reasoning about abstractions," says Ada lead researcher Lio Wong, an MIT graduate student in brain and cognitive sciences, CSAIL affiliate, and LILO co-author. "But we can combine the tools that software engineers and roboticists use with LLMs to solve hard problems, such as decision-making in virtual environments."

When the researchers incorporated the widely-used large language model GPT-4 into Ada, the system completed more tasks in a kitchen simulator and Mini Minecraft than the AI decision-making baseline "Code as Policies." Ada used the background information hidden within natural language to understand how to place chilled wine in a cabinet and craft a bed. The results indicated a staggering 59% and 89% task accuracy improvement, respectively.

With this success, the researchers hope to generalize their work to real-world homes, with the hopes that Ada could assist with other household tasks and aid multiple robots in a kitchen. For now, its key limitation is that it uses a generic LLM, so the CSAIL team wants to apply a more powerful, fine-tuned language model that could assist with more extensive planning. Wong and her colleagues are also considering combining Ada with a robotic manipulation framework fresh out of CSAIL: LGA (language-guided abstraction).

Language-guided abstraction: Representations for robotic tasks

Andi Peng, an MIT graduate student in electrical engineering and computer science and CSAIL affiliate, and her co-authors designed a method to help machines interpret their surroundings more like humans, cutting out unnecessary details in a complex environment like a factory or kitchen. Just like LILO and Ada, LGA has a novel focus on how natural language leads us to those better abstractions.

In these more unstructured environments, a robot will need some common sense about what it's tasked with, even with basic training beforehand. Ask a robot to hand you a bowl, for instance, and the machine will need a general understanding of which features are important within its surroundings. From there, it can reason about how to give you the item you want.

In LGA's case, humans first provide a pre-trained language model with a general task description using natural language, like "Bring me my hat." Then, the model translates this information into abstractions about the essential elements needed to perform this task. Finally, an imitation policy trained on a few demonstrations can implement these abstractions to guide a robot to grab the desired item.

Previous work required a person to take extensive notes on different manipulation tasks to pre-train a robot, which can be expensive. Remarkably, LGA guides language models to produce abstractions similar to those of a human annotator, but in less time.

To illustrate this, LGA developed robotic policies to help Boston Dynamics' Spot quadruped pick up fruits and throw drinks in a recycling bin. These experiments show how the MIT-developed method can scan the world and develop effective plans in unstructured environments, potentially guiding autonomous vehicles on the road and robots working in factories and kitchens.

"In robotics, a truth we often disregard is how much we need to refine our data to make a robot useful in the real world," says Peng. "Beyond simply memorizing what's in an image for training robots to perform tasks, we wanted to leverage computer vision and captioning models in conjunction with language. By producing text captions from what a robot sees, we show that language models can essentially build important world knowledge for a robot."

The challenge for LGA is that some behaviors can't be explained in language, making certain tasks underspecified. To expand how they represent features in an environment, Peng and her colleagues are considering incorporating multimodal visualization interfaces into their work. In the meantime, LGA provides a way for robots to gain a better feel for their surroundings when giving humans a helping hand.

An 'exciting frontier' in AI

"Library learning represents one of the most exciting frontiers in artificial intelligence, offering a path towards discovering and reasoning over compositional abstractions," says assistant professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison Robert Hawkins, who was not involved with the papers. Hawkins notes that previous techniques exploring this subject have been "too computationally expensive to use at scale" and have an issue with the lambdas, or keywords used to describe new functions in many languages, that they generate.

"They tend to produce opaque 'lambda salads,' big piles of hard-to-interpret functions. These recent papers demonstrate a compelling way forward by placing large language models in an interactive loop with symbolic search, compression, and planning algorithms. This work enables the rapid acquisition of more interpretable and adaptive libraries for the task at hand."

By building libraries of high-quality code abstractions using natural language , the three neurosymbolic methods make it easier for language models to tackle more elaborate problems and environments in the future. This deeper understanding of the precise keywords within a prompt presents a path forward in developing more human-like AI models.

Lionel Wong et al, Learning adaptive planning representations with natural language guidance, arXiv (2023). DOI: 10.48550/arxiv.2312.08566

Andi Peng et al, Learning with Language-Guided State Abstractions, arXiv (2024). DOI: 10.48550/arxiv.2402.18759

This story is republished courtesy of MIT News ( web.mit.edu/newsoffice/ ), a popular site that covers news about MIT research, innovation and teaching.

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New Rules For Doing PhD in India (2023)

Jan 2, 2023

Image credit: Unsplash.

Dr Tushar Chauhan

UGC has proposed new rules and regulations in 2022 for doing PhD in India. Here are critical changes for students willing to do PhD in 2023.

A Master’s degree or 4 years of bachelor’s is required to apply for any PhD in India. However, the 4 years bachelor’s will only be used for tech and engineering students, for now.

Qualification

Now the M.Phil degree is optional for getting admission into the PhD.

For 4 years of bachelor’s and 3 + 2 years master’s degree, 75% and 55% marks, respectively are mandatory for the application.

Minimum Marks

University Grant Commissions or any private university conducts an entrance examination for PhD admission.

Primary requirement

In India, one-year coursework is mandatory for doing original research for PhD. Students have to complete their coursework before starting research.

Course work

The ideal duration for doing a PhD in India is 3 years. Students may ask for more time if required.

The previous important requirement for PhD award– research paper publication is now not compulsory for getting the doctorate honor.

Publication

Besides, all other previous important rules and regulations are unchanged., i hope you like this story. please share it and visit our blog for more content., next story- 9 benefits of gantt chart for phd..

IMAGES

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COMMENTS

  1. PhD in Law

    An LLM is generally a precondition of admission to the PhD. Students without an LLM should apply initially to the Research LLM; after their first year of study they can apply to advance to the PhD. Degree Requirements. Graduate Seminar I: Legal Research (GS LAW 6610) Graduate Seminar II: Advanced Legal Research Methodologies (GS LAW 6611) Study ...

  2. Ph.D. in Law in USA: Universities, Admissions, and Fees, etc

    The USA is home to the top universities with the best faculty and resources. Students from all over the world dream of pursuing a master's degree or Ph.D. in the USA. This offers them a great return on their investment.

  3. What Is An LL.M. Degree? Everything You Should Know

    An LL.M. is a globally recognized degree, and international students may enroll in an LL.M. program if they first earned a law degree in their home country. International lawyers who have earned a ...

  4. The Academic Path: Becoming a Law Professor

    In most of these countries, an undergraduate law degree qualifies one to become a solicitor, but many law schools will not typically appoint faculty with less than a master's degree. Over 80 percent of the law professors at Melbourne University or Hong Kong University, for example, have a Ph.D., J.S.D., D.Phil, or LL.M..

  5. LL.M. Program

    The LL.M. (Master of Laws) program is a one-year degree program that typically includes 180 students from some 65 countries. The Graduate Program is interested in attracting intellectually curious and thoughtful candidates from a variety of legal systems and backgrounds and with various career plans. Harvard's LL.M. students include lawyers working in firms, government officials, […]

  6. LL.M. Programs for Non-Law Graduates

    Some distance learning courses, including the University of Edinburgh s LL.M. in Innovation, Technology and the Law and the University of London External Program, also consider non-law graduates. But even if these programs accept students from other backgrounds, a certain legal knowledge is expected. Particularly for international law programs ...

  7. Ph.D. Program

    The deadline for submission of all materials is December 15. Applicants to the Ph.D. in Law program must complete a J.D. degree at a U.S. law school before they matriculate and begin the Ph.D. program. Any questions about the program may be directed to Gordon Silverstein, Assistant Dean for Graduate Programs, at [email protected].

  8. Graduate Program

    The Graduate Program attracts lawyers of demonstrated intellectual and academic excellence from all over the world. The LL.M. and S.J.D. programs expose students to American modes of legal education (which emphasize critical thinking and self-inquiry) as well as to substantive law, and enhance our students' ability to do advanced scholarly work.

  9. LL.M. Admissions

    The Graduate Program is interested in attracting intellectually curious and thoughtful candidates from a variety of legal systems and backgrounds and with various career plans. Harvard's LL.M. students include lawyers working in firms or NGOs, government officials, law professors, judges, diplomats, activists, doctoral students, business people, and others. The diversity of the participants ...

  10. Admissions: Graduate Research

    Applicants Without a Law Degree. We expect most applicants to the Research LLM program to hold an LLB or JD. Most applicants to our PhD program have already completed an LLM. A limited number of places in the LLM and PhD programs are available to candidates who have outstanding academic records but do not hold an academic degree in law.

  11. Programs for Non-Lawyers

    Programs for Non-Lawyers. Georgetown University Law Center offers two graduate level programs for non-lawyers: the online Master of Studies in Law (MSL) in Taxation and the Master of Law and Technology. Georgetown University Law Center's world-renowned Graduate Tax Program has the largest tax curriculum of any school in the United States.

  12. PhD in Law (L.L.D): Specializations, Universities & Scope

    PhD in Law. Regarded as the highest degree in varied academic disciplines, a Doctorate of Philosophy ( PhD) aims to provide students with a chance to delve deeper into a specific area of study. For a field like Law, a doctoral degree is suitable for those wanted to pursue their career as legal scholars and teachers.

  13. Pursuing an LL.M. Without a Background in Law

    Officials at these schools say that students from non-law backgrounds choose to pursue LL.M.s for a variety of reasons. "We probably have people from every degree program from the arts and humanities degrees during the LLM," says Sangeeta Shah, co-director of the University of Nottingham's LL.M. programs. "The most common degrees are history ...

  14. Research LLM

    Osgoode's Research LLM is a full-time, research-intensive program that is ideal for students who want to pursue a specific area of legal study in depth, including those who are considering a PhD. Students conduct their research under the supervision of an Osgoode faculty member. The Research LLM does not qualify students to practise law in ...

  15. Can You Get a PhD without a Masters?

    Yes, it's possible to get a PhD without first having a Masters degree. The conventional route for someone who earns a PhD is to pursue a Bachelor's degree, followed by a Masters degree and then a PhD. However, several students opt to bypass a Master's degree by enrolling onto a doctoral programme as soon as they complete their ...

  16. Doing a law PhD without a masters

    Getting a high 2:1 as a minimum is important on your LLB. 99/100 PhD places will be given to students with a Masters in law/LLM. The MPhil is essentially a research Masters. If you want to do a PhD I would recommend doing an LLM with a dissertation element. Further, your LLM will give you some grounding in research methods which will be helpful ...

  17. Bagging NLP/LLM Research Roles without a PhD?

    Yea, long ago, I finished my Master's at a top 20 engineering school, I was able to land a research position at an FFRDC (lab) doing NLP work. I was the only person without a PhD and will surrounded with lifers, several were previously profs at some of the best schools. I then went back to school and got a PhD.

  18. Graduate Programs in Law (LLM, PhD)

    Courses. The Graduate Seminar on Legal Education and Legal Scholarship (LAWS 3010/3020) is a required class for LLM students and is open to, and may be required for PhD students.This seminar is given in the Fall term and early part of the Winter term and requires from the student a comprehensive class presentation based on a substantial written paper.

  19. An integrated LLM-PhD degree

    After the completion of LLM, students are assessed for their eligibility to doctoral studies. Students are offered a monthly stipend of Rs 25,000/month in the first year and Rs35,000 in the second ...

  20. Ph.D (Law)

    a) NLSAT-PhD: 50%. b) Research Proposal: 35%. c) Oral Presentation: 15%. The maximum number of Ph. D seats for the Academic Year 2024-25 are 8 (Eight). This includes 4 in Ph.D (Law) and 4 in Ph.D (Interdisciplinary). The University reserves the. right not to fill all the seats where sufficient candidates do not satisfy the admission requirements.

  21. LLM PhD Integrated Course, Full Form, Eligibility, Admission, Syllabus

    The fee structure of the LLM PhD integrated course is planned by the management authority of the academic institution. It may vary across colleges, depending on the facilities provided and previous academic records. The average LLM PhD fees range from Rs. 2 lakhs to Rs. 6.3 lakhs, based on the college choice.

  22. Natural language boosts LLM performance in coding, planning, and

    Without the ability to learn new concepts like humans do, these systems fail to form good abstractions — essentially, high-level representations of complex concepts that skip less-important details — and thus sputter when asked to do more sophisticated tasks. ... Their neurosymbolic method LILO uses a standard LLM to write code, then pairs ...

  23. Yale NLP/LLM Interest Group Talks < MyYSM

    05/01/2024 event : This is an interest group on natural language processing (NLP) across multiple schools at Yale. We will have faculty and students to share

  24. Natural language boosts LLM performance in coding, planning and robotics

    Large language models (LLMs) are becoming increasingly useful for programming and robotics tasks, but for more complicated reasoning problems, the gap between these systems and humans looms large. Without the ability to learn new concepts like humans do, these systems fail to form good abstractions—essentially, high-level representations of complex concepts that skip less-important details ...

  25. GPT-4独走の一方で国産モデルも善戦--ZDNET読者に聞いた「注目するLLM」

    ZDNET Japanは4月、ウェブサイト内の投票機能「クイックポール」で「注目している大規模言語モデル(LLM)」に関する読者アンケートを実施し、397 ...

  26. New Rules For Doing PhD in India (2023)

    UGC has proposed new rules and regulations in 2022 for doing PhD in India. Here are critical changes for students willing to do PhD in 2023. Image credit: Unsplash. A Master's degree or 4 years of bachelor's is required to apply for any PhD in India. However, the 4 years bachelor's will only be used for tech and engineering students, for now.

  27. Department of Law

    The Department of Law was established in November 1959 for the purpose of imparting post graduate legal education and encouraging legal research, the need for which was felt long ago as Mumbai is the commercial capital of India and the importance of the study of Law and legal research cannot be over emphasized.