Turow suggests the Law School also has an effect on the character of its students. The school "reinforces a tradition that emphasizes achievement, which is not really a neutral term because it buys in at a certain level that says, 'Don't worry about what it means, just achieve. Go out there and practice on Wall Street--that's classy law. Don't worry about the rest of it.'

"I've seen people who are really far gentler, less agressive souls than I am, give in to what I consider--fooey, fuck what I consider--what they consider to be forms of corruption in their time here. And the reason is not that they are enormously weak, but because there's nothing here to support them."

While grade anxiety abates after the first year, Turow says, 2Ls and 3Ls find other sources for the competitiveness that can subtly transform a student. Fresh carrots dangling from the ends of the sticks, but the same old donkeys after them. "People have said to me the competition for jobs makes the competition for grades look trivial," Turow says. "Performance in class is no longer important; it's who made you an offer and flew you down to Washington that becomes the new status, and some people crave it. People will back-bite, and go interview with law firms and say bad things about people they know.

"The fact that you're going to be able to get far better jobs than the graduates of most other law schools in the United States loses all significance. That was granted you the minute you walked in the door. The sense that there are any options that are no longer available becomes something of importance."

Turow says a need to succeed makes him particularly vulnerable to a false god, ambition. "I spent four of my five years at Stanford writing a novel I was unable to sell," he recounts. "I found it an intense, in many ways devastating, experience. A very serious book. Very polished. I still read the prose with great pleasure. I came here feeling that, for whatever reasons, I'd failed as a writer, so I wanted to do something well. I wanted to start in a new field and feel successful with it." The hallmark of doing something well, he adds, bringing it all into focus, "is to do it better than someone else."

In the preface to One L Turow wrote, "I should say once, forthrightly, that I am proud to be a student at Harvard Law School ... I'm sure that much of this book bespeaks that pride, but I make this declaration in order to ensure that my occasional criticism of HLS will not be misunderstood..." Asked to comment on that pride, in the light of the book's fairly extensive criticisms of the Law School, Turow offers several explanations. "I'm an ambitious person, and Harvard makes me feel successful, just having gotten in here. That's the ugly side of why I'm proud of being at Harvard Law School. Another reason," he continues, despite his appraisal of the 2L and 3L years, "is because there's a spirit of serious intellectual endeavor here."

Refreshingly, the last part of Turow's answer could almost have come from the mouth of an undergraduate: "Besides, there are a lot of good people here. I am proud to be a friend of my friends."

Just three months stand between Scott Turow and what will probably prove a far greater source of pride: his J.D. degree. With a job to look forward to, and without his former enthusiasm for academics, there is little to hold Turow's interest in the Law School in the meantime. And plainly, Turow is looking forward to working in the U.S. Attorney's office--he says being a prosecutor will "renew that 1L feeling of 'How in God's name am I going to make it through all these commitments?'" Most of all, though, his new job should afford Turow the chance to achieve the success he has been searching for since his years at Stanford. Perhaps he will even lay his "enemy" to rest.