After college, Seth Waxman lived in a mud hut for a year on the edge of Kenya’s Great Rift Valley. While there, he taught school to village children and pondered his future. “I thought about an astonishing array of things,” he said. “Like what was my role in the cosmos and how I could have a meaningful life.”

He settled on becoming a lawyer, and applied to Yale Law School by aerogram from Africa. He hoped to be socially useful but was acutely aware of the need for economic stability.