Saturday, October 27, 2007 7:45 AM
Blawg Book Highlighter #7: Scott Turow's 10 Books to Read on the Law
This week's Highlighter is a 10-for-1 special. Rather than focusing on just one book, we're looking at ten.
Specifically, we're highlighting Scott Turow's 10 Books to Read on the Law which is one of those hidden gems that you can stumble upon while browsing Amazon.com.
And it truly is a great find. In this "So you'd like to…" guide, Turow, whose law-school memoir, "One-L", we highlighted in week 1, provides a literary treasure trove of his choices for the ten books to read on the law. It's a fascinating list, ranging from the philosophical, "A Theory of Justice," by John Rawls (Turow writes: "Without doubt, the most influential work of jurisprudence written during my lifetime, a towering and penetrating analysis of the goals of law.") to classic novels like "To Kill a Mockingbird," by Harper Lee, "Billy Budd" by Herman Melville, and "Bleak House" by Charles Dickens.
As I read through Turow's recommended readings on the law, it occurred to me that my own legal education failed to expose me to any of these books. Sure, I'd read a couple of them in high school or undergrad. But not one of them I'd read in law school.
If I were to fathom a guess, I'd say that more than ninety percent of the reading I did in law school was case law, most of which is pretty dry material.
Of course, it is necessary to know case law if you're going to be a lawyer. But I do wonder if our legal education is shortchanging us. Really, when I saw Turow's choices for books to read on the law, I felt cheated. Why hadn't I read any of the books on his list when I was studying the law?
You can learn a lot about the law by reading books that don't cite any case law. Books such as those on Turow's list arguably would make for a more well-rounded, meaningful and engaging legal education. Should they then be required reading in law schools? With his "10 Books to Read on the Law," Turow makes a strong case that they should.
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Randy Richardson is an author, humorist, former journalist, and a lawyer. His fiction debut, Lost in the Ivy, a murder mystery set against the backdrop of Chicago's storied Wrigley Field, won the Writers Marketing Association's “Fresh Voices” Book Award and the Illinois Woman's Press Association's Mate E. Palmer Communications Contest. He writes the Dad Libs column for SanityCentral.com and is a frequent contributor to Chicago Parent magazine. In his day job, he is an attorney for the Social Security Administration’s disability appeals branch. At night and during lunch breaks, he serves as president of the Chicago Writers Association (chicagowrites.org) and works on his second novel while a 4-year-old tugs on his legs. Visit his website at www.lostintheivy.com.
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