Review: One L: An Inside Account of Life in the First Year at Harvard Law School

One L: An Inside Account of Life in the First Year at Harvard Law School by Scott Turow
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Overall, this is an engaging and enlightening memoir. Much of it I liked very much, but it falls short for me in a couple of key areas, preventing me from giving it a 4. (If I could, I could give it a 3.7)

Turow does an excellent job pulling back the curtain on the anxious and thrilling experience of engaging with law study at Harvard Law School in the late '70s. This seems, even if more extreme, a special case of graduate school. It does not seem all that different from my own experiences, except perhaps the magnitude of reading and memorization for would-be lawyers. The details and logic of law - from feudal origins of property law to the irreconcilable hopes for equal application and human context - is the meat to the experience and could be amplified in detail and nuance. This is where the content begins to falter.

Where it more meaningfully falters for me is the details around "The Incident." A student is belittled by pseudonymous Harvard Law Professor Rudolph Perini. (Apparently based on Arthur R. Miller.) From my own experiences as a graduate student and college instructor it is hard for me to see how this rose to the level of a multi-student written protest and plan for collective action. There was also student body meetings on protesting curriculum design. Was this just a '70s active student body? did things change at all? Turow does not reveal....

Probably most important - and this surprises me from a professional novelist - the pyschological and existential dimension of "meet my enemy," his term for, I guess, elements of his personality he disrespects and finds ugly yet finds enshrined in institutional law, is a subject too vague in the telling.

I was also better educated on the status and import of being part of Harvard Law Review. A decade later, Obama was the prestigious journal's first black president while during Turow's time, the first woman to serve as the journal's president was Susan Estrich (1977), who later was active in Democratic Party politics and became the youngest woman to receive tenure at Harvard Law School.



View all my reviews