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I didn't read much as a kid. The basketball court, not the library, was home to me. But like most aspiring young lawyers, I read a few legal biographies: John Marshall, Abraham Lincoln, Clarence Darrow, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Louis Brandeis -- these were my heroes. Their biographies were hagiographic. These were the secular saints of the law, and their biographies were obliged to present them as larger than life. Even as a kid I didn't believe it. I never trusted biographies. In reaction to having been brought up as an orthodox Jew, I was inherently skeptical of authority figures, scriptural accounts and perfect people. Then in college I began to read fiction. Now here was something I could believe in, because it didn't claim to be the truth or the word of God. Instead, the great novelist discovered truth without claiming to be faithful to the facts. My favorite fiction writers were Dostoyevsky and Kafka. I wanted to be a lawyer even before I read The Trial, but it was reading The Brothers Karamazov that made me decide to become a law teacher.

- excerpted with permission from The Book That Made Me A Law Professor, published in the California Lawyer Magazine, March 2002

Reviewed by Alan M. D.

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