Scott Turow, Three L

Scott Turow is the author of "One L," and autobiographical account of the first year at Harvard Law School. Before coming to the Law School Turow spent five years at Stanford University as a fellow and a lecturer in creative writing. Turow, who has also written a novel and several short stories, all unpublished, obtained a contract to write "One L" before matriculating in the Law School in September 1975. Currently in his third year at the Law School, Turow is now working on a novel about the mid-'60s.

Scott Turow is moving on. He's got one term left at the Law School and after that, the real world: he has signed a four-year contract as a prosecutor with the United States Attorney's office in Chicago, where he worked last summer. In the meantime, he spends three to four days a week in a clinical program, which includes a day in court. Because of his plans for going into trial law after graduating, Turow's participation in the clinical program will form some of the most important lessons the Law School can teach him.

"One of the things that to me was absolutely shocking when I started in the Suffolk attorney's office was that I had more sympathy for the defendants than many of their lawyers did," Turow says. As he continues, it becomes clear the program has indeed made him increasingly sympathetic--with the lawyers. Having defended "hundreds of other people who had committed the same offenses," he explains, "these lawyers could no longer rationalize to themselves that misbehavior is the effect of corrupt social structures, since husbands and wives and daughters and cousins of the same person would come in, all of whom would be perfectly admirable human beings, although they had existed under the same circumstances.

"It's all vanity in the end--I feel very funny about answering questions again and again about the book and about the Law School, but if you write, you just want people to listen to you," Turow says, answering a question concerning the amount of time he takes off from school to lecture and give interviews. Oh yes: "And me being a creative writer, seeking the truth is also part of the enterprise."

A desire that One L be commercially successful strongly influenced the way in which Turow wrote the book. "I wasn't trying to imitate James Joyce," he says with sincerity. "A lot of the characters are flat deliberately. I could have written more of a novel, where more of the characters have deep internal lives, but I'm proud of the book I wrote. The only character in One L with a deep internal life was one.

"Nor do I offer myself as the most sophisticated social critic. It's a question of the degree to which you want to alienate your audience." Plainly, alienation does not stand much of a chance with Turow. "I hoped that the wives of corporate lawyers would be able to read this book," he says. One L has already proven ten times more successful than Turow originally expected it would be, he says.

Some of Turow's classmates and professors at the Law School suggest he may have been too willing to sacrifice accuracy for that commercial success. A friend in Turow's 1L section, who asked not to be identified, said, "The thing I wonder about Scott is, he came to the Law School with a contract from his publishers, so he knew he was writing the book right from the start. During our 1L year he formed a study group known for writing big outlines, and I think the group actually created tension in our section. I don't know that his story might not be exaggerated by an effort on his part to develop the tension, to create a 'Paper Chase.'"

Turow acknowledges this criticism, but disagrees. Sort of. "A lot of my classmates think I did exaggerate the grade competitiveness. My own response is that I think there's poetic truth in One L"--not bad, for a book Turow himself deems too flat and stereotyped to call a novel. "People claim not be as conscious of grades, not to feel those pressures. My own sense is that I really got to the genie of Harvard Law School. The genius. The germ."

It is hard to recognize Turow from his selfportrayal as an anxiety-ridden student in One L. One indication of change is his attitude toward academics. When asked about his 3L courses, Turow bursts into genuine laughter: "Who, me? Courses? The second and third years," he explains, "tend to fade into some kind of boredom, distraction and distance from school. Course material seems much less difficult, and students suddenly stop working as hard."

Despite the academic pressues that lead many law students to consider 1L the worst year of their lives, Turow says in some respects he prefers 1L to the later years. "What's exciting to me about the first year," he says, "is the extent to which legal problems tended to be talked about as points involving conflicting ideals. That kind of talk is stifled in the second and third years; you get that one day in your corporations class in 2L, when your professor makes the perfectly apparent argument that you can't have corporate directors thinking about anything besides maximizing share values and that you can't worry about the fact that their company is, say, dumping napalm on the Vietnamese. You accept that, and that's the end of it. The end. Then you go off, and you practice law. Now, there's really something to be said on both sides of that question, but after 1L you just stop saying it. That's why I don't want to be a corporate lawyer. I don't want my focus to be narrowed that way. I'd rather be on the other side of the courtroom from somebody I feel has been really oppressed, and confront the fact that I may be continuing his oppression, than go into a law firm where the focus narrows to where I no longer have to accept responsibility for what I am doing."

Turow's nostalgia for the legal philosophizing that goes on in 1L may reveal something about his approach to law in general. Arguments over conflicting ideals proceed on a highly intellectual level, one that Turow clearly finds stimulating. There seems to be something of this abstracted viewpoint in the way Turow discusses his future with the U.S. attorney's office as well.

"I like prosecuting," he says. "It's a morally live universe. What I like about the Chicago office is that they deal not only with individuals at the bottom end of the spectrum, they also deal with a lot of white collar crime and political corruption. I am happy to be involved with that. I find it progressive. And I love criminal law. It must be the Dostoyevskian streak in me. I'm fascinated by the accumulation of forces that make people behave in ways that everybody else hates."

In his book Turow wrote of coming to the Law School to "meet my enemy," his term for the elements of his personality he disrespects and finds ugly. On this subject, too, he speaks with a disquieting detachment:

"I think I'm realistic about what's persistent in my own character," he says, "the carnivorous kind of ambition that I and some of my classmates feel, that allows us to tolerate some of the hard things done in the name of the law although those things are really foreign from our best characters."

His description evokes a real enemy, distinct from Turow yet dealing within him. And while he talks of confronting ethical issues and accepting responsibility for his actions, his enemy metaphor almost seems to excuse ugly behavior.

Turow suggests the Law School also has an effect on the character of its students. The school "reinforces a tradition that emphasizes achievement, which is not really a neutral term because it buys in at a certain level that says, 'Don't worry about what it means, just achieve. Go out there and practice on Wall Street--that's classy law. Don't worry about the rest of it.'

"I've seen people who are really far gentler, less agressive souls than I am, give in to what I consider--fooey, fuck what I consider--what they consider to be forms of corruption in their time here. And the reason is not that they are enormously weak, but because there's nothing here to support them."

While grade anxiety abates after the first year, Turow says, 2Ls and 3Ls find other sources for the competitiveness that can subtly transform a student. Fresh carrots dangling from the ends of the sticks, but the same old donkeys after them. "People have said to me the competition for jobs makes the competition for grades look trivial," Turow says. "Performance in class is no longer important; it's who made you an offer and flew you down to Washington that becomes the new status, and some people crave it. People will back-bite, and go interview with law firms and say bad things about people they know.

"The fact that you're going to be able to get far better jobs than the graduates of most other law schools in the United States loses all significance. That was granted you the minute you walked in the door. The sense that there are any options that are no longer available becomes something of importance."

Turow says a need to succeed makes him particularly vulnerable to a false god, ambition. "I spent four of my five years at Stanford writing a novel I was unable to sell," he recounts. "I found it an intense, in many ways devastating, experience. A very serious book. Very polished. I still read the prose with great pleasure. I came here feeling that, for whatever reasons, I'd failed as a writer, so I wanted to do something well. I wanted to start in a new field and feel successful with it." The hallmark of doing something well, he adds, bringing it all into focus, "is to do it better than someone else."

In the preface to One L Turow wrote, "I should say once, forthrightly, that I am proud to be a student at Harvard Law School ... I'm sure that much of this book bespeaks that pride, but I make this declaration in order to ensure that my occasional criticism of HLS will not be misunderstood..." Asked to comment on that pride, in the light of the book's fairly extensive criticisms of the Law School, Turow offers several explanations. "I'm an ambitious person, and Harvard makes me feel successful, just having gotten in here. That's the ugly side of why I'm proud of being at Harvard Law School. Another reason," he continues, despite his appraisal of the 2L and 3L years, "is because there's a spirit of serious intellectual endeavor here."

Refreshingly, the last part of Turow's answer could almost have come from the mouth of an undergraduate: "Besides, there are a lot of good people here. I am proud to be a friend of my friends."

Just three months stand between Scott Turow and what will probably prove a far greater source of pride: his J.D. degree. With a job to look forward to, and without his former enthusiasm for academics, there is little to hold Turow's interest in the Law School in the meantime. And plainly, Turow is looking forward to working in the U.S. Attorney's office--he says being a prosecutor will "renew that 1L feeling of 'How in God's name am I going to make it through all these commitments?'" Most of all, though, his new job should afford Turow the chance to achieve the success he has been searching for since his years at Stanford. Perhaps he will even lay his "enemy" to rest.