One L by Scott Turow (1977)

This is a harrowing tale.  One of self inflicted injury--the tale of the first year of law school at Harvard--which is something that has been famously been told over and over again, but this one is told inmemoir style, and soon after the experience, so there is a rawness to it that some of the other law school horror stories lack.

It was written over 30 years ago, and of course the ability to abuse students in such a way has changed--you can still teach Socratically, but the bullying aspect of the story told here have become largely a thing of the past--much like in medicine, you cannot be outright mean without the expectation that you will be charged with harassment and risk being fired.

Turow was a non-traditional student, so on top of the difficulty of any one year of professional school, he also had a family that he was neglecting--that really does not play much into the book (he wrote a post-script years after this book was first published noting that yes, he was still married to that long suffering woman), so I think it does reflect the ups and downs of the first year of law school--and closely parallels the emotional roller coaster of the first year of medical school and the first year of a medical residency program.  You start off idealistic, you then realize that the work is completely overwhelming and you are crushed by it--and by how much more your peers seem to know than you do.  Then it becomes a grind, just trying to manage the work, ignoring the rest of your life, and then at the very end there is some light at the end of the tunnel.

Another I read noted that there are valuable things in One L for today's law students and they are this:
Still, there are bits of advice for the aspiring law student that might be distilled from One L:

1. Despite all apparent evidence to the contrary, you are not far less intelligent than your classmates. The scramble for law school admissions tends to admit students within a particular class at a particular school who are roughly equivalent in talent and intelligence for the study of law.
2. Spend more time in the library and less time stressing about the adequacy of your study group, or your study group’s outline.
3. Treat your classmates, and your professors, with generosity and compassion.
4. Cling tightly to your sense of right and wrong.