Switching disciplines

[celph]

Hi,

So, I'm getting cold feet. The plan so far has been to get a PhD in classics. I'm pretty sure that I could become a v. successful classics professor. But I've been going crazy lately, wondering whether this is the right path for me. I will be graduating from a history department with a major in classics.

Now, many classics departments websites, in their pages on graduate placement etc. contend that "many of our graduates go on to have successful careers in law or medicine".

Like this for example; just googled it:

http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/arts/clas ... s/careers/

And my question is, how do you do that? Is there any way to get an MA in law after a BA in history? Or a PhD in law after a BA in history and an MA in classics? Why would a law department offer admission for a PhD to a history student rather than an actual law student?

Thanks

[liszt85]

Why would a psychology dept offer a graduate funding package to a physics major? I'm sure each dept has its own reasons. For instance, I'd think that a history student would be well aware of how laws changed over time and in what social contexts, etc and would make a very good student of law!

[LingGrad2009]

Law schools tend to prefer breadth of preparation. They are going to teach you law when you get there; they don't need you to come in thinking you already know it. For this reason, pre-law is often an inadvisable preparatory major.

Look at the Western legal system: a huge portion of it, as well as all of its vocabularly, is drawn from Greek and Roman tradition (classics, history). My own major, linguistics, is also a strongly favored preparatory major due to its introduction to semantics and precise analyses of the details of language. Law schools welcome biology and chemistry majors because of the great deal of forensics evidence that is being presented in courts, and computer science majors because of the high incidence of computer crime and the current furor over distribution of intellectual property. From my own (brief) research as I considered a JD, all of these majors had higher acceptance rates than pre-law.

In fact, pre-law is probably the only major out there that actually has NO application to field of law after receiving a JD. All it does is get you in, while the rest provide a foundation and direction for the rest of your career.