Department Updates

History:

The Best Law School Preparation

A major in History provides the ideal preparation for law school and a successful career as an attorney. The skills you hone as a History major will serve you well when you take the LSAT, while you are in law school, and during your career in the field of law. As a History major you develop the ability to argue persuasively using historical data to support your arguments, to conduct thorough and meticulous research, and to write convincingly. These are precisely the skills demanded of attorneys.

A recent national study of law school admissions commissioned by Chicago State University found that 79 percent of History majors applying to law schools were admitted, compared to 73 percent of Political Science majors, 67 percent of Sociology majors, and 56 percent of Criminal Justice majors.

Another recent study, published in the Journal of Economic Education (Spring 2006), found that History majors scored an average of 155 of the LSAT (compared to an overall average for all majors of 152), whereas criminology majors scored only 147, and Political Science majors scored 152.

The web site of the Law School Admission Council, which administers the Law School Admission Test (LSAT), has helpful information on "Preparing for Law School" for prospective law school students.

Our Department's Undergraduate Advisor, Ralph Heissinger, is eager to answer any questions you may have about crafting a History major that will prepare you to succeed on the LSAT and in law school. A variety of History courses provide significant insight into the origins and development of the Anglo-American legal system. Among them:

History 303 (American Legal History) provides an overview of the origins and development of fields of law and legal institutions in the United States, and the relationship between the law and American society and politics.

History 333 (Britain to 1688) provides an overview of the origins of legal and constitutional theories and practices seminal to the development of modern Anglo-American law and government, including Anglo-Saxon legal customs, feudal law and the emergence of common law, the Magna Carta, and the origins and evolution of Parliament, statute law, and equity law.

History 413 (American Revolution and the New Nation) provides in-depth analysis of the origins of American revolutionary ideology, including the legitimacy of violence against tyranny, natural rights theory, popular sovereignty, and republicanism. It focuses at length on the origins of the Articles of Confederation, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights, examining the incorporation of the concepts of separation of powers and federalism into those documents.

History 415 (Civil War and Reconstruction) provides an in-depth analysis of pre-Civil War laws of property and of slavery, and the legal theory and practice of secession, federalism, and popular sovereignty. It traces the evolution of Lincoln’s views of both slavery and of civil liberties, and his power as commander-in-chief. It studies the origins and application of the Emancipation Proclamation, as well as the amendments to the Constitution during the Reconstruction Era.

History 419 (U.S. since 1945) provides an in-depth examination of the increasing influence of the U.S. Supreme Court (and lower-level federal courts) on the lives of Americans.  In particular, cases involving Civil Rights, abortion, voting rights, consumers' rights, the First, Fourth, Fifth, and Sixth Amendments, and privacy issues, to name a few, affected American society, the economy, and politics, and shaped both our understanding of the law and the interactions of all Americans.

History 426 (The Enlightenment) provides an in-depth examination of the intellectual movement that was central to modern conceptions of law, jurisprudence, and criminal prodecure, including the Baron de Montesquieu's conception of the notion of a separation of powers in government, an idea which became integral to the nature of the U.S. Constitution. Many Enlightenment philosophers embraced the concept of the rule of law, in which no one--not even a sovereign king--could stand above the law or contravene it without due process. Most Enlightenment figures also endorsed the notion of basic human rights, including the rights to religious conscience and free political expression, notions that were embodied in the eighteenth-century U.S. Constitution and French Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen.

History 433 (Tudor-Stuart England) provides an in-depth examination of the power of law to govern the sovereign and the commonwealth in a nascent constitutional monarchy. Students examine in detail the various legal systems, jurisdictions, and procedures operating within early modern England and examine the debate concerning “divine right monarchy” and its consequences, including the Petition of Right in 1628 and a series of political, legal, and constitutional crises that resulted in civil war, regicide, and a written constitution, the Instrument of Government, that installed the rule of law and the Commonwealth. The course concludes with new ideas about law and government voiced by theorists such as Thomas Hobbes and John Locke, the Glorious Revolution (1688), the creation of the Bill of Rights (1689), and the ratification of Parliament’s ascendancy.

Other courses of interest to History majors planning to attend law school include:

Political Sciences courses on the federal court system (319: The Judiciary, and 488: The Supreme Court) and on Constitutional law (410: Constitutional Law: Government Organization, and 411: Constitutional Law: Civil Liberties and Civil Rights).

Philosophy courses on the philosophy of law and on legal reasoning: 205 (Philosophy, Law, and Society), 420 (Philosophy of Law), and 440 (Legal Reasoning).

In addition, Law Enforcement and Justice Administration offers courses on criminal law and civil law, including LEJA 212, 312, 412, 413.

History honors students may also be interested in the Honors Pre-Law minor. See the Centennial Honors College for more information.

Non-History majors planning careers in the law will be interested in the transcripted Legal History Minor offered by the History Department.