This is a second read for me. I just found it on Kindle, and I had to pick it up. I this would be a great book for anyone that is entering Law School, no matter what school they attend. I enjoyed this book just as much this time around. It is very inspiring, and I find that I read through the Con Law book that I still have from my 1978 course.
08/28/2017: It looks as though I read this book in August. I just finished Paper Chase and was not all that impressed with it, compared to this book. I read some of the reviews, and found it interesting that some agreed with Turow's assessment, others found it a bit dramatic. I have started this book a third time.

I am about to be a OneL, so this book meant a lot to me. I can imagine a lot has changed in 35 years, but the emotions have not. I am nervous, and I know my colleagues are too. We will face a different set of challenges than the protagonist, but it is nice to know what I am feeling is normal. Here is to the year!

I was drawn to this book out of a morbid sense of curiosity after completing two years of graduate school myself (though in social work, not law). I wanted to know if a student in a different program, some thirty-plus years earlier would have a similar experience. I was not disappointed. Turow describes how he was drawn to law school after spending some time being an English lecturer, and how some of his classmates and friends came from similar backgrounds and academic levels. He approaches the first year of law school with no small amount of trepidation and quickly becomes overwhelmed with readings in a language he is not acquainted with. He describes the feeling of "becoming unmoored" encountered by not only himself but most of his classmates as they wade into deeper waters of academia while losing touch with the world outside of the law school. Turow sufficiently described his experiences in his first year of law school that I was able to relate to his misery and anxieties. In short, the experiences of law students thirty some years ago at an ivy league institution isn't all that dissimilar from graduate students today.

Scott Turow has written an illuminating account of his first year at Harvard Law School and, considering how little legal education has changed since its origins in the late nineteenth century, it is an account which is and will continue to be, for the foreseeable future, timely, relevant, and accurate.

In view of the prestige and elitism of the institution where he got his legal education, certain tendencies present in many educational institutions are likely to have been exaggerated in Turow’s experience in ways that prove revealing. The faculty there were a little more arrogant, the students a little more competitive than customarily, and therefore for Turow a little bit more effective as examples with which to probe certain characteristic tendencies (i.e. faculty arrogance) which make up the subject matter of the book. In brief, everything in this book is likely to be more over-the-top than in another school and this makes for much more exciting drama and personality clashes. The pride over good grades and the grief over bad ones is more exaggerated, the secrecy surrounding effective study aids is more pronounced, the studying more round-the-clock.

One of the things I loved about this book was the x-ray on grades that Turow does. He writes about grades from every angle imaginable, from analysing his own reactions to his grades to the sort of mass hysteria induced in his classmates.

At Harvard good grades are essential to getting in and in Harvard they are vital to prestigious opportunities for students such as an invitation from a faculty member to work on their research or selection to work on the Harvard Law Review. The students there have all been carefully plucked from the wider collection of humanity because of their obsession with and ability to get good grades so they’re already primed to be focused like a laser on them.

The way in which overachievers treat high grades as a trophy, as a validation, as a necessity, it’s all here. One student tells Turow that his first thought on seeing his grades was that there’s “something wrong” because one of them was not an A. One of his professors gives an exam and prefaces it by telling the class that they worry about the exams too much and ponders whether exams merely test “time management.”

People can try to escape the gravitational pull of grades but they ceaselessly return to a sort of institution-wide obsession with them. And they underpin a lot of the behaviour of the students and their teachers, including one section where Turow’s own obsession with besting his fellow students on an exam inspires him to act in ways which he is ashamed of in retrospect. The way that he can let this obsession get to him while also seeing the way the obsession undermines the mission of the school is one of the things I loved about the book.

Aside from this grade theme which runs through the book there is a complete summary of all the activities of the One L, a first year law student. Turow traces his journey from his decision to go to law school through applying, registering, shopping for textbooks, and attending classes and a few extra-curricular activities. He thoroughly explores the Socratic Method and presents the occasionally soap-opera-like interactions of the faculty and the students from classes to study groups.

The intensity of Turow’s first year of law school is extreme at times and this book really allows you to feel what he felt throughout the year. Passages of contemporaneous diary entries help with that but Turow mostly recounts his story and analysis in the past tense, something which allows you to experience all the events, along with enough background information and subsequent thought, that you really get a complete picture of what it must be like to go to law school and get this tremendous introduction to legal thinking and the legal process.

might or might not be terrified to start school in the fall but it’s fine

Shoutout to Ashley at my law firm (a fellow incoming 1L) for recommending this book.

A lot of hilarious and thoughtful one-liners here. I copied them over to my journal.
An overwhelming account of neuroticism that makes you facepalm along with and for the author, but there are good observations about how law school education can be changed.

Scott Turow in his present-day afterword (sometime in the 2010s): "Law school teaching concentrates on what the judges were thinking in rendering their decisions. But what about the lawyers who brought the cases to court? What were they trying to accomplish for their clients, and what professional necessities controlled the arguments the lawyers made?..."

I think he was essentially asking for a professional responsibilities course (which is standard at law schools now) but adding some philosophical and substantial dimensions to it.

Since I have often read legal thrillers, I was interested in how the lawyers are trained. Scott Turow's book about his firt year at Harvard Law School I found very, very interesting.

Some of the technical data may have changed--prices for lawyers; people use laptops now not typewriters and so on. But human nature changes slowly if at all. The pressure, stress and competitiveness that Turow describes no doubt still fairly accurate even after all these years.

I recommended it for any interested in law or lawyers; I give it a solid 3 stars; not fantastic but well worth reading if the subject matter is of interest to yoou.

Scott Turow’s engrossing account of his first year at Harvard Law School. It is told in chronological order from first class to finals. There is a lot of drama in the competitiveness of the students - both the desire to support each other but also deal with pressure of grades, and the potential ramifications (Law Review, hiring decisions, etc.) Turow went to Harvard in the mid-1970s, so there have likely been changes since then, but he definitely has opinions on areas for improvement and the lack of effectiveness of the Socratic method. I am impressed by the author’s ability to work his magic on what could have been dry material. It is far from it. I flew through this book. I wish Turow would write more non-fiction. He has a knack for it. I enjoyed this even more than his fiction.

This is like Fourth Wing but scarier and without dragons. Read at your own risk.

An exciting yet nerve-wracking (for an entering One L) account of the first year of law school. Although the harrowing pedagogical methods described by Turow have fallen out of common use in law schools, this is a valuable introduction to how the One L year is structured as well as some of the basic legal concepts discussed. It does not deal much with the substance of the field of law, but is nevertheless valuable for law students, if for no other reason than to know that you are not alone in the roller coaster ride of confusion and enlightenment, victory and defeat that is the first year of law school."

A drama both intellectual and interpersonal via a keen eye turned on an ensemble cast; a memoir but also an immersive and smartly-paced ethnography. Trends and frustrations, like the sense of losing your intuitions and your identity in 1L, are expressed perfectly in the voices of various classmates who cry and feud; views, reactions, and cults of personality around the professors shift dramatically as students and the ways they are willing to learn change. Turow showed what there was to love about his experience — the amazing people and possibilities in the energy between them, the challenge of the law, even the joy of being in a somewhat cult-like and insular environment — but by the end I too felt wrung out and pessimistic, and surprised that HLS could near beat the love of learning out of clearly thoughtful, interesting, and interested former Amherst and Stanford English professor.

The terminal insight is that law schools accept students, train them, and evaluate/differentiate them only as legal academics (of which judges are an extension), in a particular process-oriented techno-philosophical skill set for execution that leaves them agnostic to goals and values. A confusion between “doing good” and “doing well” in an infinitely plastic system where reasoning trumps rightness because there are no accepted solutions. There is little attention to what the skills are or should be for, and how lawyers can work this out for themselves. Professors, who have done well in law schools, pass on their approaches through “Socratic hazing,” professor-student competition, and other methods which can apparently give the impression that it is characteristically “legal” to be brutal and heartless. While Turow finds legal work to be fundamentally human-centric, he found law school dehumanizing and I can see how his classrooms and evaluations obscure what the law is FOR and sacrifice the ability to create a “cultural center to the practice of law.”

Made me want to keep a 1L diary, particularly since I think my perspective on competitiveness and “the enemy within myself” may be different. And to catch up with myself regarding the books 11-12 major pedagogical questions at 1L’s conclusion.

The book was what I expected although a few interesting insights. The afterward also discusses some changes in law education since the 70s. The description of the experience of the first year of law school could deter some from attempting but serve as a reality check for others. It’s a good read for the family/significant other of someone starting law school so they are aware of what the 1L will be going through.