One L

Depending on the reader, One L, Scott Turow's now-famous depiction of his first year at Harvard Law School, serves different purposes. To current attorneys with stable careers, it makes for great pleasure reading. They can read with a smile of recognition as they recall that harrowing first year. They relate to the situations portrayed by Turow. Now safely ashore and out of that storm, they can turn their heads and look back at the raging sea. It's all behind them, thankfully.
 

To would-be law school students, however, it's a striking, intimidating portrayal of what is yet to come. A non-stop inundation of cases and citations, of names and events, of concrete laws and the exceptions that make them not-so-concrete. To these students, One L is an alarming warning. Do I really want to tackle this "enemy," as Turow refers to it?

And to the general public, unversed in the legal world, it's a fascinating look at an otherwise esoteric institution. Everyone knows of the prestige of Harvard Law School, but One L gives an insider's look at it. And this particular insider is not a public relations guru whose aim is to enhance enrollment and build up the school's aura; it's a common student who simply writes of his day-to-day quest just to make it through that tumultuous first year. This theme is relevant to almost anyone who attended college, or even just high school. Some teachers are better than others. Cramming is a necessity. Competition among students is fierce. So while the pressures of Harvard Law School are no doubt greater than undergraduate colleges, any student can relate to Turow's experience.

One L, of course, is the phrase used to describe first year law students. Turow gets right to the heart of the matter on page one. He's entering Harvard Law School and is preparing for the registration process. It's interesting that Turow doesn't delve too much into his personal background or how he came to be at Harvard. That's not the point of his book. There are passing references throughout to Turow's background, his previous jobs, his family activities, etc. But these instances are rare, and you immediately realize that the gist of the book will be a straightforward, linear journal of his HLS experience only. Every other aspect of his life is treated secondarily. It's a biography narrowed down to a one-year section of his life, narrowed down further by covering only one specific, engrossing element of that one year.

Turow would later become a successful novelist (e.g., Presumed Innocent), and much of One L foreshadows that writing skill. We meet Turow's HLS friends much the same way a novelist would introduce a character: a name, a brief physical description, and a blurb of background information for each (although Turow admits he changed names and backgrounds). The friends we meet throughout become his study partners and confidantes. The professors are more like the antagonists. At first they're mysterious creatures whom Turow knows about vaguely from talking to other students, but eventually they become more and more relevant. They are the men who decide Turow's grades and, ultimately, his fate.

During the Fall Term of 1975, Turow focused mostly on 2 professors, Perini in Contracts, and Zechman in Torts. Immediately you can tell that Turow favored Perini, both as a person and his teaching style. He liked Perini for his sense of humor and his straightforward, open approach to teaching and to giving assignments. Zechman, on the other hand, was portrayed as almost absent-minded, asking haphazard questions that there seemed to be no clear-cut answer to. Turow never hid his annoyance with Zechman.

Turow didn't know it at the time, but later he'd come to realize the method to Zechman's madness. His opinion of Perini would change as well. In the Spring Term, his views on both of these professors had flipped; now Turow realized that Zechman's approach had indeed been effective, while Perini (who taught a second Contracts class in the Spring as well) had fallen out of favor. You could almost see this switch coming.

There was a certain naivete on Turow's part in his early portrayals of these two professors. Turow initially wasn't taking the time to realize what Zechman was doing. By asking so many questions over and over again, Zechman was training the students to think like attorneys, to find solid answers and facts even in situations where no solid answers exist. And when an answer apparently did exist, he'd throw in a lot of "but what ifs," which drove Turow crazy. Zechman was handling his class the way a court might be run. No opposing attorney would say, "Good point. You're correct," and move on. Instead, there would always be "buts," and that's exactly what Zechman was trying to get across. He was doing his job properly. You realize this when reading Turow's stories about him, but the interesting thing was that Turow himself didn't realize it at first.

One of the best and funniest lines in One L appears when Turow is growing more and more frustrated with Zechman and all his "what ifs." They were talking about the ramifications of a man firing his gun into the air and shooting a duck. What if the duck came down and killed another man? Turow found this discussion ludicrous (again, at first he hadn't realized the importance of Zechman's class). Exasperated to the utmost, he writes, "For the next two days we talked about that goddamn duck."

Of course, later he called Zechman a "jeweler of ideas" once he realized how effective Zechman's style was. In a pop culture analogy, Turow was like Ralph Macchio in The Karate Kid. He sands the floors and waxes-on, waxes-off the cars, growing more and more frustrated at these ludicrous exercises. But when push comes to shove and it's time for the karate tournament, suddenly all those exercises pay off and the Kid realizes the brilliance of Mr. Miyagi. That is Turow and Zechman.

Perini, on the other hand, showed Turow the opposite side of the teaching spectrum. At first Turow liked his style and his methods, but he came to realize that these methods weren't as effective. He noted that Perini changed his teaching technique midstream and started to give boring lectures, as opposed to involving the class in Socratic discussions. It was interesting to see the very gradual role reversal of Perini and Zechman in the eyes of Turow.

The Socratic Method. It's another main theme in One L that Turow seems to have mixed feelings about. On one hand he dislikes the grilling that goes on, but on the other he realizes that this grilling will be infinitely easier if the student is prepared. A professor will not keep picking on a prepared student. Turow seems to complain about the Socratic professors, but when he's in a straight-lecture class, he doesn't seem to like that either. He seemed to go into HLS thinking that the law was made up of very black-and-white concepts, and he had to learn about the infinite gray area. The Socratic Method, with all its "what ifs," helped Turow learn about that gray area.

His point seems to be that there's no clear-cut way to teach a law class, and that students have to adjust to the rigors of whatever the professor chooses to put them through. This holds true for almost any class at any level. Many of our favorite instructors are remembered for how they taught us, in addition to what they taught us.

The other One L students also play roles in the book. We see Turow's friendships blossom mostly through study groups and discussions about the law. There are a few instances of outside-HLS activities-such as a weekend getaway with David and drinking beer with Stephen-but for the most part the friendships take place on campus. It's interesting to see how these friendships were altered once the pressures and competitive nature of finals began to come about.

Members of the study group began to chastise each other for not getting their share done. No one had time for socializing. Tempers were short, and time was running out. Everyone had different ideas about how to go about studying. Should they try to figure out what specific questions would be on the test, or just try to prepare for the possible questions in general? Should they study the hornbooks or read the cases in full? There were even questions about how much should they help one another. After all, the other students were Turow's competitors.

There were arguments where Turow was torn. His friend Terry, in one instance, was completely lost in his approach to a case they were preparing for. The adviser told Terry he was wrong, and Terry lost his temper. Turow clearly knew his friend was wrong, but his sense of loyalty made it hard for him to side with the adviser. It ate at him until the situation eventually diffused itself.

The best parts of One L are Turow's inner struggles to succeed, and his getting used to the overwhelming difficulties of being a first year law student. There are some less-than-memorable parts of the book where he goes off on tangents. For example, he explores the history of women and minorities at HLS. That could be another book in and of itself, and it seems a bit out of place in this book about a white man's first year in law school.

He also goes into great detail about a seemingly minor student protest over Perini's treatment of a student. Perini had chided Mooney for not being prepared in class. Perini required a note from each student if they weren't prepared, and Mooney had not given him such a note. This very issue plays into the not-so-black-and-white nature of the law that Turow was studying and writing about.

Perini had clear rules about giving him notes if you're unprepared. Mooney disobeyed the rules and was (mildly) reprimanded. He was not expelled and did not receive an automatic F or anything severe like that, yet several students in Turow's section decided to defend him. Perhaps this was a sign of the times, since student protests in the 70s were quite common. They drafted a letter to Perini, and this letter somehow made its way to the campus newspaper. There was no upshot. The entire issue, the "Incident" as Turow referred to it, faded away into obscurity, leaving one to wonder why Turow included it in the first place. He wasn't the chastised student, nor did he sign the letter. He was barely involved in the situation at all. Brief little sidetracks like The Incident take away from Turow's own personal story in One L.

The midpoint of the book is, sadly, almost its climax. To compare One L to a novel, the main "conflict" of the book is in the days leading up to his final exams of the first term. He opens his heart in writing about the many emotions and internal struggles he was going through. The lack of sleep weighed heavily on him. He took Valium. Finally, it was exam day. There's a genuine curiosity and intensity you feel here. You're dying to know how he does on the exams.

That sort of intensity was clearly missing when Turow took his second term exams. Granted, this isn't a novel, and if Turow wasn't as tense the second time around, he certainly should not have invented it just for the book. But after he receives his first-term grades, (good, but not excellent, he realized), the rest of One L seems almost anticlimactic.

Turow called himself a 11/2 L in this second term. By this time, law school, and One L, had lost its freshness. Turow resorted to filling up pages with stories like The Incident and the history of minorities at HLS mentioned above. Even though he had only one term under his belt, he was accustomed to HLS by his second term, and this greatly diminished the appeal of his adventure. He was experienced now. The great unknown didn't exist anymore. And that loss of law school innocence detracted from the second part of One L.

But all in all, One L still stands as a unique, enjoyable work. Nearly 30 years after its publication, it has passed the true final exam: the test of time.

ONE L, by Scott Turow. Warner Books, 1977.