 First edition | |
| Author | Scott Turow |
|---|---|
| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Genre | Autobiography |
| Publisher | Putnam |
Publication date | 1977 |
| Media type | Print (hardback & paperback) |
| Pages | 288 (paperback) |
| ISBN | 0-446-67378-1 (paperback) |
| OCLC | 50942678 |
| LC Class | KF373.T88 A33 1997 |
| Followed by | Presumed Innocent |
One L: The Turbulent True Story of a First Year at Harvard Law School is a 1977 autobiographical book by Scott Turow.
One L tells author Scott Turow's experience as a first-year Harvard Law School student. The book takes place in Cambridge, Massachusetts where Harvard University is located. First years, or One-L's as they are often called, all face similar issues their initial year of law school. Harvard, known for its reputation as one of the best law schools in the country, takes only about 12% of applicants. [1]
Turow recounts his time there, the professors and classes that helped mold him into the lawyer and writer that he became. Each professor has their own very distinct teaching style and demeanor that Turow thoroughly outlines. Professor William Zechman with his disorienting hypotheticals, Nicky Morris, the young and progressive civil procedure professor who is well liked among students, and Rudolph Perini, a notorious, brilliant bully in the court and classroom.
All of the characters, including the professors, were real people, though Turow changed their names and distinguishing characteristics. One of the recurrent characters, Rudolph Perini, was identified as Harvard law professor William Miller. [2]
The narrator, a previously successful, young English instructor at Stanford with a deep affinity for law. After deciding to take the LSAT on a whim, his high score gives him the opportunity to select among the elite law schools. Turow notes that he decided to choose Harvard Law based on its reputation as one of the most elite, despite the fact that many of his colleagues who had attended did not speak very highly of the school. Turow and his wife move to Arlington, Massachusetts, and he begins classes in the fall of 1975. It is at Harvard that he "meets his enemy."
One of the notable professors at Harvard. Morris is known for his tranquil demeanor and unorthodox teaching style. Morris taught first year civil procedure at the university and was well liked among the students. Prior to teaching at Harvard, Morris had graduated at the age of 23 and developed a very impressive resume, including clerking for a Chief Justice. Morris was one of the easier professors who would call students based on the seating chart and offering them the option to pass on a question if they did not know the answer. Morris held a degree of contempt for the school and its teaching methods, noting that it did not please him that he was an educator at a place that had been the root cause of anguish and anxiety for many alumni.
A torts professor who recently returned from a long absence and proves to be a bit of a mystery to his students. His class, while engaging, is a long series of elaborate hypotheticals that appear to be designed to confuse students, or at least that is how it felt to Turow. While a kind and patient man, his classes often left his students befuddled trying to decrypt their incoherent notes.
One of Harvard's most notorious professors. One L's are warned immediately of his class and are encouraged to stay away. Whether it was the workload or his overbearing demeanor, students were not a fan of Perini or his class. A proud Texan and graduate from UT Law, he made himself a large presence in any room that he was in. He had no issue with calling people out in class regardless of whether they wanted to participate or not. He encouraged students to remain at least three cases ahead of what the syllabus said, but it was implied that this was not merely a suggestion. He would verbally accost students who could not answer the questions; however, he had an amazing gift of making students think critically. Perini challenged students to explain and justify beliefs and values that were so central to their identities that they were nearly inarticulable. He often relied on the Socratic method of teaching, [3] which a law review had referred to as "public degradation, humiliation, ridicule, and dehumanization." They go on to say that "Professor Perini of One-L has helped foster an image of the archetypal law school professor who challenges, probes and even humiliates students in repeated exchanges of questions and attempted answers." [4]
An old college friend of Turow's who he reconnected with once at Harvard Law. He was a second-year student who has come to law school after he realized that his dream of working in higher education was not financially stable enough. He was a member of the Board of Student Advisors which guided One-Ls thought their first year. BSA was also in charge of organizing and facilitating the Moot Court competition.
A former OEO lawyer based out of Washington who was working on his graduate law degree while also teaching law. He ran the Legal Methods Program which was essentially a law lab.
A fellow One L Turow meets during his first year. From Elizabeth, New Jersey, he had been less than forthright during his application process. Upon their initial introduction, Terry tells Scott that the only reason he had gotten into the school is that the school had mistakenly believed that he was Puerto Rican. Nazarrio seems to wear this as a badge of honor.
Scott Turow's wife, a teacher, who moves with him to Arlington, Massachusetts, a town next to Cambridge, to be with Turow during law school.
The book became a perennial best-seller, read by many students as they prepare for their first year in law school. According to a 2007 story in The Wall Street Journal , One L continued to sell 30,000 copies per year, [5] many to first-year law students and law school applicants. It challenged the Socratic method and made people think critically about how the law was being taught in the classroom. Harvard no longer uses the Socratic method to teach law because they realized that students were not learning to their full potential under that structure. [4] The American Bar Association was also highly impressed with Turow's work; however, they pushed back against his anti-Socratic sentiments throughout the book. [6] A novel with a similar theme was published in 1971, six years before One-L, called The Paper Chase.
The Socratic method is a form of argumentative dialogue between individuals, based on asking and answering questions. It is named after the Classical Greek philosopher Socrates. In Plato's Theaetetus, Socrates describes his method as midwifery because it is employed to help his interlocutors develop their understanding—this development is compared to the growth of a child in the womb.
Harvard Law School (HLS) is the law school of Harvard University, a private research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Founded in 1817, Harvard Law School is the oldest continuously operating law school in the United States.
Scott Frederick Turow is an American author and lawyer. Turow has written 13 fiction and three nonfiction books, which have been translated into more than 40 languages and sold more than 30 million copies. Turow’s novels are set primarily among the legal community in the fictional Kindle County. Films have been based on several of his books.
Columbia Law School (CLS) is the law school of Columbia University, a private Ivy League university in New York City. It was founded in 1858 as the Columbia College Law School. The university was known for its legal scholarship dating back to the 18th century. Graduates of the university's colonial predecessor, King's College, include such notable early-American legal figures as John Jay, the first chief justice of the United States, and Alexander Hamilton, the first Secretary of the Treasury, who were co-authors of The Federalist Papers.
Samuel Williston was an American lawyer and law professor who authored an influential treatise on contracts.
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Robert Maynard Hutchins was an American educational philosopher. He was president (1929–1945) and chancellor (1945–1951) of the University of Chicago, and earlier dean of Yale Law School (1927–1929). His first wife was the novelist Maude Hutchins. Although his father and grandfather were both Presbyterian ministers, Hutchins became one of the most influential members of the school of secular perennialism.
The Paper Chase is a 1971 novel written by John Jay Osborn Jr., a 1970 graduate of Harvard Law School. The book tells the story of Hart, a first-year law student at Harvard, and his experiences with Professor Charles Kingsfield, a brilliant and demanding contracts instructor whom he both idolizes and finds incredibly intimidating.
Christopher Columbus Langdell was an American jurist and legal academic who was Dean of Harvard Law School from 1870 to 1895.
Peter John Kreeft is a professor of philosophy at Boston College and The King's College. A convert to Roman Catholicism, he is the author of over eighty books on Christian philosophy, theology and apologetics. He also formulated, together with Ronald K. Tacelli, Twenty Arguments for the Existence of God in their Handbook of Christian Apologetics.
Arthur Raphael Miller, is a leading scholar in the field of American civil procedure and a University Professor at New York University and Chairman of The NYU Sports & Society Program.
Derrick Albert Bell Jr. was an American lawyer, professor, and civil rights activist. Bell worked for first the U.S. Justice Department, then the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, where he supervised over 300 school desegregation cases in Mississippi.
The USC Gould School of Law, located in Los Angeles, California, is the law school of the University of Southern California. The oldest law school in the Southwestern United States, USC Law traces its beginnings to 1896 and became affiliated with USC in 1900. It was named in honor of Judge James Gould in the mid-1960s.
The history of Harvard University begins in 1636, when Harvard College was founded in the young settlement of New Towne in Massachusetts, which had been settled in 1630. New Towne was organized as a town on the founding of the university, and changed its name two years later to Cambridge, Massachusetts, in honor of the city in England. It is the oldest institution of higher learning in the United States.
A correspondence law school is a school that offers legal education by distance education, either by correspondence or online by use of the internet, or a combination thereof.
The casebook method, similar to but not exactly the same as the case method, is the primary method of teaching law in law schools in the United States. It was pioneered at Harvard Law School by Christopher Columbus Langdell. It is based on the principle that rather than studying highly abstract summaries of legal rules, the best way to learn American law is to read the actual judicial opinions which become the law under the rule of stare decisis.
The Paper Chase is a 1973 American comedy-drama film starring Timothy Bottoms, Lindsay Wagner, and John Houseman, and directed by James Bridges.
Wesley Alba Sturges (1893-1962) was an American legal scholar who served as a professor of law at the Yale Law School from 1924 to 1961, and served as dean of the law school from 1945 to 1954. He received his LL.B. from Yale in 1923. He retired from Yale in 1961 to become dean of the University of Miami School of Law. He was a prominent figure in Yale's Legal Realism movement. In his article, Legal Theory and Real Property Mortgages, 37 Yale L. J. 691 (1928), he sought to make the Legal Realist point that doctrinal distinctions between "lien theory" and "title theory" did not have any actual effect on how courts ruled in litigation about mortgage disputes. His casebook, Cases and Materials on the Law of Credit Transactions, emphasized the contradictions in judicial decision-making and sought to dispel the view that "what judges said in one case with its setting can be used to [predict] what they will decide in another case" with a different factual setting.
Charles Marvin Williams was an American finance professor at Harvard Business School. He was a recognized authority on commercial banking who taught his students using the case method.
John Kaplan was a legal scholar, social scientist, social justice advocate, popular law professor, and author. He was a leading authority in the field of criminal law, and was widely known for his legal analyses of some of the deepest social problems in the United States. He was known for his work linking sociological research with legal policies, and limiting academic legal theory with real-world sociological data. He was an advocate for ending criminal prohibitions on private behavior such as drug use, arguing that these laws only made any problems worse.
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