I truly enjoyed this & would definitely recommend it to anyone who is curious about the legal field or law school. Considering it’s a recollection of Turow’s year in law school from 1975, I was surprised that the book’s content is fairly comparable with today’s legal pedagogy. My only complaint was some rather antiquated ideas expressed about women and people of color in the legal field, but overall it was a concise and beneficial to grasping the undertaking of pursuing a career as an attorney.

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.

One L is an engaging view into what is otherwise a mystery: the first-year experience at Harvard Law School. Whether considering law school, studying adjacent to the law, or working in legal policy, this book is absolutely essential. Written in a captivating and emotional way (the book does have a plot!), I found myself often unable to put it down. There is personal drama, academic drama, and even internal struggles explored in this book. Turow's battle with his "enemy" encourages every reader to confront their own enemy. The points on legal education reform are made beautifully and in ways that make it difficult to disagree. While I'm sure much has changed in about fifty years, the book is an undeniable ticket into what waits behind the doors of the HLS buildings.

I wish that I read this sooner. It was exactly how my experience at law school has been. It was comforting to know the law school experience is somewhat universal - from the intensity of the assignments to your emotional state. I would recommend this to anyone starting law school or currently in their first year of law school looking for some validation that it is as bad as it feels but also that it will be okay.

Ahhhh.
Kicking the year off with a five star is a great feat. Especially after the constant dearth of good literature I’ve been reading. This was a breath of fresh air.
It’s a very niche topic, but one I am interested in: The 1L experience of law school. And from none other than a famous Harvard alum. This book was everything I wanted and more. It toned down what *The Paper Chase* exacerbated, and focused on what it missed. This was a methodical experience of law school. Discussing some of the nuances that came up in case study, the different idiosyncrasies of various faculty, the day by day look inside a legitimate law school, the harrowing experience of cold-calling and the despisition of Socraticism, and last but certainly not least, and perhaps most important in fact, the critique of law school, its agenda, motives, and methodology. I repeat: this was everything I wanted and more. The perfect book about a law school experience.
A necessary primer for anyone interested in the law and law school itself.


“Right now admissions at most American law schools are based on predictions of how well applicants will do in school, which is to say how high they will rank on exams. Those forecasts, based on statistical formulae that combine LSAT scores and college grades, are often quite accurate. But that amounts only to saying that American law schools admit people who will be good test-takers rather than good attorneys. Correlations between exam success and worthwhile achievements in the practice of law are speculative at best. Until that connection is better established, the narrow and arbitrary nature of exams will continue to dictate a narrow and arbitrary means of selection for training for the bar. And that is a peculiar state of affairs for a profession and an education which claim to concern themselves with rationality and fairness.”

#Micdrop

Five easy stars.

Must disagree with the jacket/ GoodReads blurb, "entirely true." NOT according to one of his undergrad professors, Theodore Baird, who wondered how Turow could present himself as such a blank slate upon arriving at Harvard Law, when he had endured the undergrad assault of Baird's Amherst College. But of course, it makes a better story about only the Law School if the naive youth arrives so unprepared for the Big Leagues.
But he'd been in the Big Leagues for four years prior: the League that produced Robert Fagles, Richard Wilbur, James Merrill, William Pritchard, the League started by Robert Frost and Emily Dickinson.
Perhaps the Bildungsroman like this requires mental rags to riches. It does read well, as if "entirely true." But isn't that the role of Fiction? I always told my classes that if a film claimed to be based on a True Story, it was far from it, because if it really was such, it would claim the Opposite: "None of the characters are based on real people…" in order to avoid lawsuits.

Definately an accurate portrayal of that harrowing first year of law school. Read it BEFORE you decide to go!

The most insane part of this story is when he bought a textbook for six dollars

The traumatic experiences of Scott Turow at Harvard veneered in not-so subtle fiction. Read it years ago and loved it. My brother, who went to Harvard Law School says it's very true to reality. I was reminded or it by a scene from The Abbey in which Detective Sergeant Ashraf Rashid's cell phone goes off during law class. The professor in The Abbey, who bears a likeness to One L's Professor Perini/Kingsfield admonishes

Scene from The Abbey: “ 'And I’m sorry we allowed a clearly unqualified applicant into this law school based on some supposed community service.' My nails bit into my palms. I shook my head and started gathering my notebooks. 'Did I pick up your daughter for solicitation or something? Or are you an asshole to everybody?' I didn’t think there was going to be any oxygen left in the room after the collective intake. That’s probably going to hurt my grade."

So relatable that I’d call it triggering!

Book on CD read by Holter Graham
3.5***

Subtitle: The Turbulent True Story of a First Year at Harvard Law School

Turow wrote this memoir just after his first year of law school, and it was published before he had graduated. It has, apparently, become a “must-read” for those contemplating going to law school, and Turow gets many letters each year from readers who strongly identify with the incidents he relates.

I was very interested in the psychology of his experience. The stress – both external and self-imposed – was palpable. Turow and his fellow students found themselves in a completely different setting. All high-achievers when they arrived they were thrown into a competitive atmosphere where they felt pitted against one another, with the result that many of them began to seriously doubt themselves and became suspicious of their colleagues.

Holter Graham does a fine job of the audiobook, which was produced in 2005, some 28 years after the original book came out. This anniversary edition included additional material from Turow, which he read himself. Also, there was a bonus interview with the author that was quite interesting.

Older book but gives a pretty realistic, if not slightly exaggerated, look into the feelings that come in the first year of law school. Still pretty accurate to modern schooling styles. Started in September and then didn’t pick up a non textbook until today and it was nice to read again for fun.