One L

"A wonderful book...it should be read by anyone who has ever contemplated going to law school. Or anyone who has ever worried about being human."—The New York Times

One L, Scott Turow's journal of his first year at law school and a best-seller when it was first published in 1977, has gone on to become a virtual bible for prospective law students

Not only does it introduce with remarkable clarity the ideas and issues that are the stuff of legal education; it brings alive the anxiety and competiveness--with others and, even more, with oneself--that set the tone in this crucible of character building.

It was a year of terrors and triumphs, of depressions and elations, of compulsive work, pitiless competition, and, finally, mass hysteria. It was Scott Turow's first year at the oldest, biggest, most esteemed center of legal education in the United States. Turow's experiences at Harvard Law School, where freshmen are dubbed One Ls, parallel those of first-year law students everywhere. His gripping account of this critical, formative year in the life of a lawyer is as suspenseful, said The New York Times, as "the most absorbing of thrillers."The most accurate, complete, and balanced description yet of a century-old rite of passage in America."--Bruce Bortz, Baltimore Sun

"A sensitive, dramatically paced account of the author's fist year at Harvard Law School...I read the book as if it were the most absorbing of thrillers, losing track of the time I spent with it, and resenting the hours I had to be away from it...It should be read by anyone who has ever contemplated going to law school. or anyone who has ever worried about being human."--Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, The New York TimesScott Turow is the author of over ten internationally bestselling books, including the Presumed Innocent series, Identical, Limitations, Ordinary Heroes, Ultimate Punishment, and Reversible Errors. He lives in Chicago, where he is a partner at a law firm and teaches fiction writing at Northwestern University.