They are not every important unless it’s something like Rhodes or Fulbright but even then the institution is more important. If you say get an llm from Yale( not on a scholarship) and one say kings college (with a scholarship) the one from Yale will always be more prestigious.

You do need scholarships for a couple of reasons:

1. to make ends meet, or to be more comfortable, during the LLM. But, maybe you can afford to do the Masters with your parent's money, after all, it is but one year! However, I shall still recommend you apply for scholarships as...

2. money begets more money. If you have successfully won the trust of one funding agency to fund your education, your chances of getting another to fund you increase dramatically. This means that the chances of you securing funding for a Ph.D. improves. And believe me, your parents will find it difficult to fund your doctoral studies, which can take up to 5/6 years in North America.

This is a generic response consumable for an everyday audience. If you have any additional (pointed) questions regarding graduate studies, I am happy to answer them.

US institutions, barring UW and Yale, do not offer a PhD in law. In the case of the latter at least, it is anyway restricted to JD graduates from the US.

Instead, they offer something called the SJD explicitly geared towards international students wanting to teach law in their home countries. This is because PhDs in law are not really expected of a professor in the US. A JD, considered a professional doctorate, is enough coupled with clerkship experience. Even if Profs do have PhDs, they are usually in allied social sciences such as Pol Sci, Sociology, Eco, etc. It is for this reason that getting into US legal academia as an international student is almost impossible, for there is simply no space for such individuals. Don't believe me, look at Stanford SJD outcomes for instance.

Anyway, if you get into a 'PhD' programme, it would be fully funded at any half decent institution. Those simply do not exist in the US, however.

You are absolutely right in that both LLB and JD are primary degrees in law. The difference is how they're styled. The LLB is considered an undergraduate degree, whether taken right after high school or after having obtained a prior undergraduate degree. The JD is, however, considered a professional doctorate, and as such is a perfectly acceptable route into legal academia by and itself. In fact, until a few years ago, almost no one pursued a PhD in allied fields and most scholars had only a JD. Look up Dershowitz, Delgado, or even Obama for that matter of fact.

SJD/ JSD is the doctoral degree in law and is awarded by law schools. PhD in Law is awarded by the school of arts & sciences so is more inter-disciplinary. Americans do the SJD/ JSD occasionally, typically when they're trying to move from a non Harvard/ Yale background into academia. Sometimes it is more strategic for them to do the inter-disciplinary degree and learn other research methods which help them stand out and write papers that are different and interesting to law journals (because jobs depend on publication records).

Short answer - No and No.

Not all Ph.D. program fully fund their students. In fact, most do not.
Also, Ph.D. is not a 'full-time job.' In fact, it is not a job at all. You are still classified as a student. A Post-Doc, on the other hand, is considered a job.

STEM degrees work quite differently from social science (law) degrees. This biggest difference - at the doctoral level and sometimes at the Masters's level - is that in STEM, you (the candidate) generally join in as a part of a larger research project a faculty member(s) is conducting. This research is funded by one or the other funding agencies. The chief investigator (faculty member) has already made provisions for funding post-doctoral/doctoral/master's level researchers while filing the proposal. On the other hand, social science generally frowns upon a candidate 'joining in' a faculty member's work.

People here give answers without any idea of the academic world. Someone said that an SJD from Yale without scholarship is preferable to one from KCL with scholarship. I disagree strongly and there are many people who would go to a lesser ranked non-US institution. Remember that it's very tough to find a job in a US law school with an SJD if you do not have a US JD. For example, Shyam Balganesh, after his MPhil from Oxford, enrolled for a JD at Yale rather than an SJD. In comparison, Mohsin Bhat and Sarbani Sen (both LLM and SJD Yale) had to return to India and are at Jindal.

On the other hand, a PhD from a lesser ranked UK/Australian institution may actually help you get a job there. Some examples:

1. NLSIU grad Mayur Suresh: PhD Birkbeck College. Now teaching at SOAS.

2. NALSAR grad Akshaya Kamalnath: PhD Deakin University in Australia. Now teaching at ANU.

3. NUJS grad Navajyoti Samanta: PhD Sheffield University. Now teaching at Sheffield.

Now ask yourself what you would prefer: SJD from Yale after spending 1 crore and teaching at Jindal, or PhD from a UK/Aus college for free and teaching in a good UK/Aus college instead of Jindal!!!

@3 - Correct. And hence in my replies (2 & 2.1.2), I had kept the conversation limited to Ph.D. as the OP clearly wanted a pathway into academia.

@2.1.1.A.1 - You are right that many people in the previous generation did get into academia, at top universities, post-JD. However, this is not true today. Especially if the OP - presumably an Indian with an Indian LLB - wishes to get in. The only (real) path is LLB + LLM + Ph.D. An alternate would be LLB + JD + SJD. In any case, getting back to the original question, scholarships are a must. Apply for whatever you are eligible for, no matter how little the money. I currently hold three different grants and have let go a fourth I had secured (due to clashes). It is all CV building apart from the additional money that you get.

No Disagreement with the bit about scholarships or the need to pursue the SJD to have any shot at getting into US academia as an Indian student. I was just explaining the OP about why the nomenclature SJD is not just a fancy way of writing 'PhD' and why there are distinctions between the two, both in the way they are treated in US academic circles and the funding opportunities available for each programme.

This response being a case in point. US law schools pay way more than law schools in most other countries, and certainly more than the UK. A no-name private law school in the US would pay more than Oxford and like it or not, that feeds the competition for American academic jobs. The tenure track ones keep you very comfortable.
Yale and Harvard JSDs get hired in the US. It's not easy and the hiring is competitive and complicated but it happens every year. You have to publish in high ranked American journals and then do job talks until you find a faculty that likes you. While the LLMs are expensive, the SJD/ JSDs are extremely competitive but mostly funded, so the UK usually works out to being more expensive unless you are among the lucky few with a scholarship.
You'll see a number of these people working in Singapore and Hong Kong for example, where they do get paid very well. This idea that SJDs/ JSDs work in India because they couldn't cut it elsewhere is racist and post-colonial. Quite a lot comes down to research area and supervisor - a specialist in Indian constitutional law is likely to find working in India satisfying in terms of research, teaching and an academic community. People whose subject areas and supervisors are more international would able and willing to seek jobs outside. Umakanth and Arun Thiruvengadam started their careers in Singapore.

There's no such thing as an unfunded Yale JSD! If you manage to get in, it is always funded. This is not true of any doctoral program in the UK. If you don't have a PhD in law, it's hard to become a professor of law in India and in some other places. So if you do the JD, you're orienting yourself to the US market in which case you want to stick with Harvard and Yale and even that doesn't guarantee anything. The SJD/ JSD/ DPhil opens up international teaching opportunities but again, you need to see if you have what the hiring countries are looking for.