Oxford or Cambridge for Social Sciences

1.

You won’t get into either unless you demonstrate a passion (and where applicable obvious or demonstrated talent - e.g. for history how well you do in the A level, for law it will likely ultimately come down to interviews) and real reasons for reading the subject.

2.

If you are ‘only’ predicted an A in history (making it on the face of things your weakest A level), that raises questions - why choose history? Do you think the teachers have it wrong such that you are likely to get an A* IF you get an offer requiring that A*? And what if you don’t get into Oxford or Cambridge - which subject would you want to study, and/or are you thinking of a gap year and re-applying (if necessary)?

3.

If you read any of the humanities/social sciences at either Oxford or Cambridge (or for that matter sciences, but I’m assuming you are not considering that!) that is typically a good way into the law. That is particularly so for history, where some of the best lawyers I know have read history (Lord Sumption for example, who was a history don before going to the Bar, then the Supreme Court).

4.

If you want to play the numbers game (which I don’t think is advisable but I can see that on its face a 25% figure of admissions for history looks easier), if you change your mind during your degree, you can convert to law even whilst at uni (I can best speak for Cambridge, where the tripos system makes this not uncommon - those switching to law after a year or even 2 of their admission subject ‘only’ have to read law for 2 years to cover all the necessary subjects to become a qualified lawyer. Or, of course, you can do the one year law conversion course and the skills learnt studying history are very useful.

5.

Otherwise, I suspect you are better placed than me to assess the history course differences between the universities (my only observation would be that it seems historians from either were typically able to specialise in their chosen fields - numerous pub quizzes and games of triv since university has exposed the ‘it wasn’t my period/field’ excuse of historians; though obviously they tend to do well on the yellow questions!).

6.

As for law, Oxford is called jurisprudence for a reason - the philosophy of law is very much part and parcel of the course (with the non-optional jurisprudence paper being a significant part of the degree). At Cambridge one can choose to avoid ‘essay’ questions (or decide to do a deep dive so as to answer an essay question)/not take the jurisprudence paper and largely focus on the practical application of the law, using inductive and deductive reasoning and making well structured analyses based on knowledge of case law and principles (answering the exam questions which are based on something like a real world scenario -even the Roman law paper has some exam questions based on A, a slave to B, wants to be freed…etc). But to be honest reading law will almost inevitably require you to take some papers you just find dull (land law is a prime candidate for the marmite award - it is compulsory and generally more hate it than love it).