I originally read ONE L, I think, because I was a big fan of The Paper Chase. This version includes an afterward, written after PRESUMED INNOCENT was published.
As a first-year law student, Turow had to study the law of Contracts, Torts, and Property, Criminal Law, and Civil Procedure. A lot of this reminded me of the Paper Chase with professors using the Socratic method in which students are interrogated at length on selected court cases from which they are expected to deduce legal principles.
Rudolph Perini, Turow's Contracts professor, will definitely remind you of Professor Kingsfield. "Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, the mornings we have Contracts . . . I'm nearly sick to my stomach. . . . I can't believe it, but I think about that class and I get ill," Turow complains.
Another Paper Chase element is the study group. A small number of students, usually between four and eight, would meet regularly to discuss common concerns. Turow valued his group for its therapeutic function. At first Turow and his cohorts in the study group disdained grades, but that gradually changed as Midterms drew closer. The top five or six people in each 1L section would be elected to The Law Review the next summer. Those elected would glean faculty contacts, the opportunity to teach at a law school, and the possibility of a Supreme Court clerkship.
Some parts of ONE L are rather funny. For instance, students often retaliated against a professor by hissing, "a piece of student weaponry frequently used when a professor dismissed a student's comments unfairly or said something hardhearted". Another instance would be the night before Midterms when Turow took a sleeping pill, and a Valium, but still couldn't get to sleep. He got up and had a drink, then another, had sex twice with his wife and finally fell asleep at three. Also, on test day, Turow brings along earplugs, paper, four pencils, four pens, three rolls of mints, two packs of cigarettes, a cup of iced coffee, a Coke, two chocolate bars, a pencil sharpener, an extension cord for my typewriter.
We also get to meet a rather famous personage. Turow signs up for Constitutional Law taught by Archibald Cox, but quickly drops the course because Cox is a dull lecturer. There is also the beginning of fundamental change. Nearly a quarter of American law students were now women. In Turow's class ten percent were black, three percent Latin, twenty-one percent women. The first female president of the Law Review was also elected.
Turow has several suggestions on how to improve Harvard Law school, especially the first year: Smaller classes, more opportunities for students to write and to make contact with the faculty, different formats for evaluation of student performance, election to the Law Review without reference to grades. He also felt that being frightened was more detrimental than motivating. He would supplement case reading with film, drama, informal narrative, and actual client contact.
Turow ends by suggesting more of a practical application. Students should be taught "brief writing, research, courtroom technique, document drafting, negotiation, client counseling, and the paramount task of gathering the facts." He would also emphasize legal ethics, suggesting that the general public has a dim view of lawyers, rating them only slightly higher than used car salesmen. What are the ethical imperatives for a lawyer who is confronted with a client who wishes to save his business, his liberty, his life, by lying under oath? he asks, implying that this sort of thing happens more often than one might think.
