One L: The Turbulent True Story of a First Year at Harvard Law School *(Book)
"A wonderful book...it should be read by anyone who has ever contemplated going to law school. Or anyone who has ever worried about being human."—The New York Times It was a year of terrors and triumphs, of depressions and elations, of compulsive work, pitiless competition, and, finally, mass hysteria. It was Scott Turow's first year at the oldest, biggest, most esteemed center of legal education in the United States. Turow's experiences at Harvard Law School, where freshmen are dubbed One Ls, parallel those of first-year law students everywhere. His gripping account of this critical, formative year in the life of a lawyer is as suspenseful, said The New York Times, as "the most absorbing of thrillers." Read more
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Why Must Read One L: The Turbulent True Story of a First Year at Harvard Law School?
This book is simply the best description of a person's first year experience in law school, although I still have a nostalgia on this topic for "The Bramble Bush" by Karl Llewellyn. Turow was uniquely qualified to write about it: he had spent several years teaching at Stanford before heading off to law school and had engaged to write a book even before he started at Harvard. He then kept notes during that 1L year and wrote the book immediately afterward. Hence, he was an experienced writer who planned well and then wrote the book while the events of the prior year were fresh in his mind. In my case, I graduated law school 25 years ago, but recently completed the LLM & SJD degrees. While this book describes law school culture prevalent back in "my day," I've also seen an immense cultural shift in law schools over the past years. Thus, some of the "hard" aspects of the 1L experience have softened a bit, but certain things have not (e.g., student anxiety).
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