One L: The Turbulent True Story of a First Year at Harvard Law School

“I know you’ll have your hands full. But it’s so important, so important to get away from the law now and then. Just so that you can maintain some perspective. Don’t get so caught up in all of this that you forget to leave it once in a while. Your work will always be there when you get back.”

Scott’s Legal Methods professor, Chris Henley, gives his students advice on their first week of class. Henley urges students not to become consumed by their studies and the law because it can warp their perspectives and actions. This advice foreshadows Scott’s struggles with The Link Between Competitive Ambition and Identity, as Scott and his classmates find themselves completely insulated in the legal environment with few opportunities to interact with the outside world. Gradually, their identities and personalities are subsumed by their studies.

“Is a brief supposed to sound casual or formal? Does it make a difference how a brief sounds? Should I include a reasoning of the judge who dissented, as well? Is this why students hate the case-study method?

Twenty minutes ago, I threw up my hands and quit.”

Scott expresses his feelings of exasperation with his first attempt at legal writing. He’s frustrated by how much he doesn’t know, not just about legal concepts, but about basic legal practices like brief writing. The string of questions followed by Scott’s ultimate declaration of defeat demonstrates the immediate fear and stress he experiences in law school, which connects to the theme The Psychological and Physical Stress of Rigorous Academic Programs.

“‘The building is named for the late Christopher Columbus Langdell, who was dean of Harvard Law School in the late nineteenth century. Dean Langrell is best known as the inventor of the Socratic method.’

David lowered his hand and looked sincerely at the building.

‘May he rot in hell,’ David said.”

On a Harvard campus tour, Scott’s friend David expresses the intensity of his dislike for the Socratic method, which is the traditional education style of law school classrooms. David curses Dean Christopher Columbus Langrell, who introduced the method to Harvard during his term in the late 19th century. David’s harsh language frightens Scott and creates deep feelings of anxiety for his first classes.

“The exorbitance of Perini’s manner had seemed to release a sort of twisted energy. Why had people laughed like that? I wondered. It wasn’t all good-natured. It wasn’t really laughter with Karlin. I had felt it too, a sort of giddiness, when Perini made his mocking inquiries.”

Scott observes a strange reaction among the students to the Socratic method, and especially to Rudolph Perini’s menacing approach. Rather than defending the interrogated student, Scott and his classmates seem to join in on the mockery and humiliation with Perini. This observation develops the theme of The Link Between Competitive Ambition and Identity, as the Socratic classroom inculcates antagonism, not only between the professor and students, but also among peers, and encourages students to act out of character in their pursuit of distinction.

“A number—even most—seemed to have found it sheer oppression. The work, the pressure, the gnawing uncertainty had been too much. During the week, I had heard complaints of insomnia, fatigue, stomach trouble, crying bouts, inflated consumption of food, liquor, cigarettes.”

Scott describes the general feeling among his cohort after the first week of law school. In this passage, he explains not only the mental exertion required, but the physical ailments that result from these exertions. Illustrating the theme The Psychological and Physical Stress of Rigorous Academic Programs, Turow reveals that students lose sleep, become ill, or turn to substances to deal with the overwhelming workload.

“If everyone was the same, you couldn’t come out ahead, as you always had before, but you wouldn’t end up behind, either, which would be crushing and which, at the moment, seemed the more real possibility. Parity, then, became a kind of appealing psychic bargain everybody swore with himself, renouncing competitiveness in the process.”

This quote further illustrates The Link Between Competitive Ambition and Identity. Despite the initial competitiveness of Scott’s classmates, as the first month progress, the students mellow and turn to seeking “parity” with their peers. Turow describes how the push for distinction stemmed from each student’s history of overachievement, but the fear of failing—instilled by the school’s competitiveness—comes to overpower these desires to stand out. Simply keeping pace with one another thus staves off feelings of comparison and failure, even if it doesn’t satisfy the students’ need for acclaim.

“‘It’s an honor,’ Peter answered. ‘It’s the honor society around here. The cream of the cream. The Harvard Law Review is the oldest law-school journal in the country. It’s respected. It’s like being on the Supreme Court of law reviews. If you’re a Review member, it just stays with you all your life.’”

Peter Geocaris, Scott’s upper-year student advisor, uses an analogy to describe the honor of being chosen to work on the Harvard Law Review, comparing it to the US Supreme Court. Those in the legal profession across the country highly respect the Review, since its membership is supposedly representative of the brightest students in the US. The possibility of making the Review looms over each first-year student throughout the text, and many people work themselves into a panic trying to achieve the necessary grades to receive the accolade.

“‘They’re turning me into someone else,’ she said, referring to our professors. ‘They’re making me different.’

I told her that was called education and she told me, quite rightly, that I was being flip.

‘It’s someone I don’t want to be,’ she said. ‘Don’t you get the feeling all the time that you’re being indoctrinated?’”

One of Scott’s classmates confesses that she feels like law school is forcing her to accept a set of values antithetical to her own. This quotation connects to the theme The Weaknesses of Traditional Legal Education, as the reliance on definitiveness and rationality in the curriculum forces students to neglect their beliefs, especially if these feelings form the basis of their arguments. The forced change in perspective goes beyond a simple education, and many students come to feel that they’re being changed on a fundamental level.

“During the first weeks of school, I had thought that our marks were used only to measure off the lofty types fit for the Law Review. But as interviews progressed and upperclassmen talked, it became apparent to me and my classmates that grades were a kind of tag and weight fastened to you by the faculty which determined exactly how high in the legal world you were going to rise at graduation.”

Scott comes to realize the ways in which a student’s grades are weaponized not only within the academic institution, but also after graduation. Students with high grades are encouraged to interview with big name law firms—many of which defend large corporate clients and offer huge salaries—and students with average or lower grades often feel like they can only achieve second-rate work. Turow uses the metaphor of “a tag and weight” to suggest that grades commodify students, marking them as products with a certain value.

“My stomach was not perpetually clenched. My pulse seemed less violent. I did not feel always on the verge of a light sweat. I realized for the first time how great the pressure was which I’d been under. I was a different person here, the man I’d been six weeks ago. I thought about different things. I was not trying to keep my language precise, or analyzing every spoken proposition to find its converse.”

Scott takes a trip with his wife and friends away from the law school, and the experience offers him much-needed perspective on his first month of school. Scott exposes the stress he was under by describing his current state as the direct opposite—for example, his pulse on vacation is “less violent,” implying that at school he has a constantly rapid heartbeat. Scott has few moments of outside perspective throughout his first year, but these moments are deeply influential in helping him recognize when his actions become too extreme.

“We now engaged in close assessments daily of how well people had done in class, especially when they’d been called on, almost as if it had been an athletic event. ‘Jack was terrific today.’ ‘Yeah, but I felt bad for him when Perini nailed him on that question. McTerney really saw that all the way. She is smart.’”

Another shift occurs in class as students start to evaluate one another’s performances to gauge where they rank among the cohort. Connecting to the theme Competition and the Warping of Identity to Achieve Success, students become paranoid with determining their placement among their peers, and they look at those doing well with both envy and resentment.

“Well over three quarters of the men and women in the section had remained. Most were angry. As they spoke up, people said repeatedly that they didn’t like being treated as children, that they had had it with subscribing to Perini’s terror and his iron rules. There was broad agreement that some kind of protest should be made.”

A major plot moment in the narrative is the Incident, wherein Perini verbally attacks a student for being unprepared and threatens to terrorize him in the next class period. Perini’s behavior makes many students deeply uncomfortable and angry, and they use the Incident as an opportunity to air their grievances about Perini’s harsh tactics and infantilization of students. The public protest against Perini influences the students’ remaining year of education as they become emboldened to stand their ground against mistreatment, signaling a turning point in the character development of the class as a collective.

“I had finally realized that there had been a worthwhile job to do and that I had done it badly. I had mocked what I should have cared about, and in the process I had strained a friendship, even embarrassed my wife a bit. I felt like the bottom of somebody’s shoe. And there was no way out. No professors to blame, no institutions.”

This epiphany changes the way Scott thinks about his work in law school. He recognizes that he should’ve taken the Legal Methods project seriously even though it was ungraded, because it was “worth doing.” This phrase suggests that he is beginning to reject the school’s emphasis on grades, remembering that there are other and more important sources of value. This moment, combined with a subsequent string of failures, alters Scott’s mindset about school and pushes him to develop the trait of moderation—not throwing himself too heavily into his studies, but also not completely withdrawing from putting in effort.

“And I’d seen some more of ‘my enemy,’ that funny, indefinite collection of shadowy and unnerving recognition about myself and what was around me to which I more and more willingly gave that name.”

In this quotation, Scott refers to the mysterious, symbolic “my enemy” figure, which he confronts throughout the text. “My enemy” symbolizes Scott’s repressed ambition and the myriad emotions this ambition induces, like despair, fury, resentment, cruelty, and self-sabotage. Scott confronts this enemy after his Legal Methods blunder and nearly failed mock exam, but the enemy reappears during moments of extreme stress and exertion.

“There was another side of my feelings. I had no desire to do the Review work. And I had resolved to be satisfied with less. But there had been moments when I envisioned my best efforts as somehow being good enough that I would have the opportunity to turn the Review down.”

Scott projects nonchalance when speaking about the Review, claiming that he wouldn’t take the work even if it was offered to him. However, this quotation reveals Scott’s secret ambition to be good enough for the opportunity to turn down a position on the Review. Scott can’t help but feel drawn toward the prestige and distinction the Review offers, even if the work is time consuming and laborious.

“In my course, it was important to be able to work with the rules, to deduce them from cases, to compare and distinguish them; but as the semester went on, more and more class discussion had focused on those philosophical, political, economic, and other pragmatic concerns which justify the rules and usually pass under the name of ‘policy.’ Issue spotters, then, do not seem to test what was learned.”

Scott describes the discrepancy between class discussions and exam questions, which often frustrates students. Connecting to the theme The Weaknesses of Traditional Legal Education, Turow exposes just how different the two expectations are: Classes are high-concept interrogations of rules and how they came about, whereas the exams primarily test memorization. These inconsistent expectations make students panic, and exam season becomes a rush not only to revise, but also to memorize new material.

“At 1½L now. The second term begins. Boredom where there once was trepidation. Devices where there once was energy. I have resolved to brief no cases this term. I want to conserve time to read a newspaper now and then, and even on occasion, a novel.”

At the start of the new term, Scott expresses growing feelings of monotony in a journal entry. He uses anaphora—the repetition of a word or phrase at the beginning of successive sentences or clauses—to emphasize the contrast between the emotions and character of the students at the start of their first and second terms. In the final sentence, Scott speaks about the non-law activities he hopes to keep up with in an effort to prevent his total enmeshment in the law school environment that he felt in the first term.

“‘By recognizing variation in the law,’ Nicky told us, ‘the Supreme Court is accepting the idea that no one rule can be thought of as somehow ‘natural’. We see the law after Erie only as an imposed order, a response to political and social tradition and not something sent from heaven. The law can change; the law can vary from place to place.’”

Nicky Morris explains a case, Erie Railroad Company v. Tompkins, and the influence it had on legal thinking, particularly on the absoluteness of the law. The case demonstrates the idea that law is a social construct that is constantly evolving to reflect a society’s changing values. This principle is one that Scott wishes was at the forefront of all legal education, so students don’t come to believe that the rules they learn—and the historic values they represent—are immutable.

“It was moot court, a mythical state, a mass of frictions; but boy, did I enjoy winning. I haven’t felt that kind of outright glee in victory in years. Maybe it’s something else law school’s done to me—more childishness—or a sign of how praise-starved I am. Maybe I just felt I’d finally done something roundly good with the law.”

In the second term, first-year students compete in the moot court competition in pairs, and in this quotation, Scott expresses his feelings of delight in winning his oral argument. After doing poorly in the Legal Methods argument, Scott took moot court seriously and feels redeemed by the result. The quotation also expresses one of The Weaknesses of Traditional Education, as the lack of mid-term assignments leaves students “starved” for feedback, particularly praise, which could help ease tensions and fears about progress.

“It had been a vulgar episode in all respects. Once more he’d used the classroom for his own purposes, turning a private matter into a public spectacle. He’d glorified himself and the job of working for him. He’d rubbed our noses in the crucial effects of grades. And once again, he’d played on our worst vulnerabilities, everything from status fears to the need for money.”

Scott describes his reaction to Perini using the classroom to interrogate the top candidates for his summer assistantship positions. Scott stops fearing Perini after being called on in class, which allows him to see the man’s character more clearly—and what Scott sees is a man who revels in the torment and manipulation of his students. Perini becomes symbolic of everything Scott detests about the Socratic method and the combative law school classroom.

“‘I never thought it would be him,’ Terry told me after watching Stephen for a while after spring vacation. ‘I mean, I’ve been around people, I know what goes on. But I didn’t think he’d get sucked in. He bought the whole trip.’

I probably should have spoken to Stephen. I saw him being taken away from himself.”

Terry discusses the changes he sees in Stephen’s behavior after Stephen received some of the highest first-term grades in the section. Stephen comes to understand the access, power, and prestige his grades can get him, and he appears to turn his back on his original commitments to teaching and his values of activism. Turow connects this observation to the theme Competition and the Warping of Identity to Achieve Success, as Stephen’s taste of success all but takes him “away from himself” and turns him uncannily ambitious.

“My control over myself was deteriorating rapidly, and somehow the business with the outline was still at the center of it. When Stephen brought the news that John Yolan had no time to do outside work, I replied, ‘Screw him, then. He wants dessert without making dinner. You heard Stan. Quid pro quo.’”

Before second-term exams, Scott’s study group starts a Criminal Law course outline early, and news of the outline upsets Section 2, who all feel like the document gives the group an unfair advantage on the exam. This quotation exemplifies Scott’s extreme feelings of resentment that emerge in response, especially to those who want access to the outline. Scott refuses to let a new group member see the outline if he won’t put any work into it himself, and he later comes to see this decision as contrary to his ethical values.

“But the risk, the ultimate risk, of allowing students to make their first acquaintance with the law in such an atmosphere, in that state of hopeless fright, is that they will come away with a tacit but ineradicable impression that it is somehow characteristically ‘legal’ to be heartless, to be brutal, and will carry that attitude with them into the execution of their professional tasks.”

After completing his first full year of law school, Scott looks back and distills his main criticism of the institution in this quotation. The aggressiveness of law school—due in part to the Socratic method and the encouraged competitiveness—instills values of cruelty in its students, which can come to plague how they practice law in the real world. Scott believes the law and lawyers should be actors for justice, and justice often requires compassion and empathy, which the law school in its current state tells students to disregard.