Word: turow
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Dates: during 1977-1977
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Eventually, we understand. Turow has met the enemy, and it is he. It is his own ambition, his own desire to achieve the trappings of success that did not accompany his career as a teacher, that he must face. If he can survive the tensions of the Socratic method in Contracts, if he can make it through the endless hours of case preparation, if he can surmount the embarrassment of blowing his presentation in the Ames Court contest, why then, Scott Turow can survive anything. "That driven quest for prominence which brings us here," he writes, "leads us, once...
...many ways, Harvard Law School is the top of the American corporate heap, but Turow fails completely to examine what that system means for those who have not attained the pinnacle. His only attempt at such critical evaluation comes in the middle of the book, when he describes a speech by Ralph Nader. Nader asks whose law is being taught here, who benefits from the current legal system. "How many sharecroppers," Nader asks his Law School audience, "do you think sue Minute Maid?" For a few hours, Turow says, he was convinced that Nader was right; he could...
...BECOMES more and more clear as Turow goes through the year that he will end up a corporate lawyer, in one of those big firms that handle the accounts of the largest, least lovable companies. Turow's first-year class was polled by the Harvard chapter of the National Lawyers Guild, with astonishing results: a large segment of the first-year class did not want to end up practising corporate law, but expected it would end up doing just that after graduating from Harvard. He writes, "For those students, the money, the power, the training, the quality of practice...
...that Turow thinks life at the Law School is perfect. But his criticisms are mild, centering on its institutional dislike of change and its ties to traditional legal education. One is forced to ask why he came to such an ivy-covered school if he wanted a looser kind of place. The Law School has many of the flaws that undergraduates complain of at the College: distant, overly august faculty members, unnecessary pressure, obnoxiously self-assured classmates, and all the other hallmarks of a school that is a little bit too preoccupied with itself. The Law School has other problems...
...this is a remarkably silly book. If it really wanted to get into the Paper Chase routine, Putnam's would have done better publishing the memoirs of a Law School custodian; he, at least, might have a new angle on the place, and would certainly have more interesting anecdotes. Turow would have done better spending less time writing the book, and more time preparing for Contracts...