www.02138mag.com

To "L" and Back

by Greg Atwan
Winter 2007 , Page 59

Tim Bower

Scott Turow is one of the great omnivores of the legal world—and the literary one. While building a career as an accomplished lawyer and then a prominent critic of the death penalty, Turow wrote One L, an autobiographical account of his first year at Harvard Law, as well as eight other books, most recently Ordinary Heroes (2005). He wrote his first novel, Presumed Innocent, on the commuter train to work as a federal prosecutor. The Chicago-area resident took time from both jobs to tell 02138 how he balances the scales of justice and inspiration.

What did you want to be growing up?
The next James Joyce.

Why law school?
When my roommates at Amherst all went off to Harvard Law School, I made fun of them. I thought they’d all sold out, and I expected them to go marching down the road to Cambridge in gray flannel suits, shoulder to shoulder in military formation. But my views obviously changed in the next five years. I knew how much money lawyers made, and thought I could work part time and have enough—I didn’t need to be rich. People would tell me I was crazy, that there were no part-time jobs in the law. But that was the confused and elemental logic that took me to law school. There were many instances where I thought I understood what I was doing, where in fact I was clueless.

How did you like it once you arrived?
The truth of the matter is that Harvard Law School is probably the most self-impressed institution in the United States except for the New York Times. In both cases, there is a good reason to be self-impressed. Almost everything you can say about HLS is a mixed bag: I was surrounded by brilliant people, and law school was the most intellectually exciting exercise of my life.

And yet you write about being particularly uncomfortable intellectually there.
You get the feeling that you don’t matter, and that you’ll only matter if you accept their terms. But the hardest thing about going to law school was that my long-nurtured ambition to be a novelist hung in the balance. I felt really committed to trying to write a little bit every day. It was really a matter of holding on to my own image of myself.

What was the atmosphere at HLS during your time there? Was everyone planning for the revolution, or just planning to sell out?
Certainly there was not a noticeable radical edge around the Law School anymore; these were no longer the days when the president of the Harvard Law Review went to work with the United Mine Workers. It wasn’t uniform, but generally speaking, most of my classmates were sort of expecting to progress to big law firms.

Did you ever think of giving up and being a full-time lawyer?
No, and part of the reason was One L was out there, and everybody who had followed me into the profession had heard of it. And I told myself that I was really a writer—I was sort of an impostor as a lawyer. I had to get back to being a writer, and was encouraged in that view by my wife. She had married me when I was a writer and really felt a little bit defrauded by the fact that she’d ended up with a lawyer, which was not what she was keenly interested in having as a spouse.

Which do you enjoy more, writing or lawyering?
There’s more tedium in being a writer than people imagine, especially when you’re rewriting. But generally it’s more fun, in the sense of child’s play, being a writer than being a lawyer; there’s excitement in the law, but there’s a lot of anger, antagonism, stress in practicing law. But you stand next to somebody you’ve known only in prison, and they’re standing next to you freed and exonerated—it’s hard to have a sense of achievement quite that tangible as a novelist. It’s hard to compare; my life would not have been as full without either pursuit.