So far, so good. But law school success involves more than thinking logically and writing well. Law students must also be able to argue cogently from fact patterns, and to compare seemingly similar but crucially different cases. They must therefore be able to think both concretely and abstractly at once, and must resist fleeing from complexity and ambiguity to the simpler realm of black and white. They also need the research instincts on which all lawyers rely.

No discipline promotes this range of skills more than history. Moreover history majors enter law school with a concrete sense of our legal system’s evolution, and with a grasp of the social forces behind it. Not by accident, a major that confronts the variety and richness of the human experience and trains students for a life of critical and independent thought is also superb preparation for the study of law.