The Making of a Lawyer

...it is odd that some think this is the school's fault...

...Turow is especially impressed with his teachers and his classmates...

...He further agrees that life at HLS is much too formal, classes too large and professors too cold...

...Here one realizes again that many HLS students have always found education, and life, to be a breeze...

...One L" is the designation Harvard Law School gives to first-year students...

...they have little to do with the quality of education or the workload at HLS...

...His picture of "classroom politics" is excellent as well, and he is right on the mark in noting that "those people heard from regularly were regarded with a kind of veiled animosity": The silent majority thinks they are showing off the ignorance of their colleagues, hogging the floor and playing up to the professors...

...If employers have no grades to go by, are they not being told that they should hire any Harvard student over any student from a "lesser" law school...

...But that is an early report, made before the pressures of competition apparently dulled the dazzling horizon a bit...

...While certainly understandable—Turow was writing a diary and had little time for slow, thoughtful, retrospective evaluations—the lapses are nonetheless significant...

...blaming their law school for their choice is simply a shirking of individual responsibility...

...Turow also scores with his portrayal of the sort of frenzy that can grip students after a few months at HLS, when relentless concentration on the law has worn nerves thin and driven all but legal thoughts from the mind...

...By October he writes, "Increasingly, I can see patterns in what I'm learning, rather than just a series of abstruse doctrines...

...The demand for the elimination of exams and grades, for example, strikes me as self-indulgence mixed with a touch of snobbery...

...He gives a telling account of the strain on him, his fellow students and his wife (the last being clearly the best indication of how fully law school took over his life...

...The first year of law school, as Turow correctly reports, is a grind...

...The author is not unaware, however, of how much he gained from the experience, and was taught in those opening classes...

...and that with all the competition, "People were under too much tension, in extremity, often too busy saving themselves to think about preserving relationships...

...Reviewed by Elliott Abrams Special Counsel to Senator Daniel P. Moynihan...

...Judge Learned Hand once said of his teachers at HLS, "From them I learned thai it is as craftsmen thai we get our satisfactions and our pay...

...He endorses the views that exams and grades are an "indignity...

...reason and objectivity may be less enjoyable, but they are the tools of the lawyer and it is hard to see how a law school could avoid training future practitioners in their use...

...The notion that Harvard, and most law schools, are too coldly professional, that Socratic classes are too big and too tough, likewise seems selfish, even immature...

...Lawyers who feel guilty about choosing Wall Street over Ralph Nader are free to change jobs...

...The suggestions that Harvard should be responsible for maintaining friendships, and that it pushes students into "selling out," are no better...

...For some, as he says, the period can be not only trying, but defeating...

...He will, in a year or two, probably conclude it ought to stay that way, so that the One Ls coming after him will get the chance to measure their abilities and dedication under no less rigorous conditions than he enjoyed...

...He nearly succeeds...

...graduate, Harvard Law School In the beginning there was Love Story, then came The Paper Chase, and now we have another book about Harvard, One L. The best of the three, it is not a novel...

...Turow's day-to-day descriptions of life under these conditions are very good...

...In addition to his evaluations, Turow provides a useful grab bag of information about "the" law school, and the others: about the competition to clerk for judges, law reviews, the thoughts and activities that occupy the student's mind and hours...

...These criticisms have been heard often in the past decade and are, I would say, essentially personal reactions...

...Turow appears to reject the standard complaints about HLS being insufficiently attuned to questions of policy, or overinclined "to substitute dry reason for emotions...

...Yet he does not argue with the contention that "objectivity" or "dry reason" are qualities to be shunned...

...His book is so informative and so accurate a picture of places and events, in fact, that one regrets all the more its considerable failures of analysis...

...He writes, "As the semester went on, more and more class discussion had focused on those philosophical, political, economic, and other pragmatic concerns...

...One L can be recommended as a tour guide to Harvard Law School, not as a serious evaluation of legal education...

...Of the latter he remarks, "After 10 years iij universities [he had graduated from Amherst, then studied and taught English at Stanford], I was accustomed to being surrounded by bright people...

...Yet I had never been in a group where everybody was as affable, outgoing, articulate, as magically able to make his energy felt by others...

...Since practically everyone entering HLS was a whiz back home, this baptism is disorienting and, at times, depressing...

...Although what lawyers do with their craft must be subject to moral judgment, most of the gripes voiced in this book would eliminate it altogether, ultimately reducing law schools to offshoots of schools of public policy and administration...

...For most students it is their initial exposure to an entirely new vocabulary, to the challenges of the So-cratic method of teaching, and to a very heavy workload...

...He recognizes that the "hard driving atmosphere" of HLS has its purpose, that one can reap benefits by pushing oneself to the limit...

...This attitude, too, is somewhat self-indulgent: Policy questions, admittedly fun and debatable, return students to the relativism that is quite familiar from their college courses...

...the book is really about the first term at HLS, though, by far the toughest...

...it is the diary of a first-year student at "the" law school, amended by later reflections...

...Turow himself notes that the financial rewards of corporate practice entice most HLS graduates...

...One wonders what those who feel distant from professors will think of the relationships they will later have with judges...

...that Harvard directs its students into corporate law firms...

...Where his predecessors served the mysterious market that consumes glamorous portraits of the country's most prominent university, Scott Turow makes a strong effort to be accurate...

...Prospective lawyers would probably do well to read it, if only to drive from their minds the romanticism of The Paper Chase...

...Law school may be their first experience with people who, unlike parents or some college teachers, are less interested in the student's personality than in his analytic ability and willingness to work hard...

...For despite his positive feelings, Turow on the whole soon accepts the complaints of some of his classmates about HLS in particular and law schools in general...