Scott Turow

Scott Turow (born April 12, 1949, Chicago, Illinois, U.S.) is an American lawyer and best-selling writer known for crime and suspense novels dealing with law and the legal profession. Many of his works, notably Presumed Innocent (1987), were adapted for film and television.

Law background and writing career

Turow received a Juris Doctor (J.D.) degree in 1978 from Harvard University. While there he published a nonfiction work, One L: What They Really Teach You at Harvard Law School (1977), that is considered a classic for law students. His first novel, Presumed Innocent (1987; film 1990 and TV miniseries 2024), was written while he was working as an assistant U.S. attorney in Chicago (1978–86). The story of Rusty Sabich, a deputy prosecutor assigned to investigate the murder of a female colleague with whom he had had an affair, is a well-crafted tale of suspense.

The Burden of Proof (1990; television film 1992) and Pleading Guilty (1993; television film 2010) continue in the vein of legal drama, although the former focuses more on the domestic troubles of its protagonist. The latter tells the story of a lawyer and former cop who is instructed to find a coworker who has embezzled millions.

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Turow’s subsequent works included The Laws of Our Fathers (1996), a legal thriller that focuses on the entangled lives of a judge and her peers who came of age in the 1960s, and Personal Injuries (1999), a story of deception and corruption. In Ordinary Heroes (2005) a crime reporter discovers papers that reveal the truth about his father’s court-martial during World War II. Innocent (2010; television film 2011) is a sequel to Presumed Innocent. Identical (2013) concerns a politician who is confronted by accusations that he committed a murder to which his twin brother confessed decades before; the novel is loosely based on the myth of Castor and Pollux.

In 2017 Turow published Testimony, about an attorney in the midst of a midlife crisis who is asked by the International Criminal Court to investigate potential war crimes involving a Roma refugee camp after the Bosnian conflict. In The Last Trial (2020), a criminal defense attorney takes his final case, which involves a friend accused of murder. Suspect (2022) centers on a police chief facing sexual misconduct allegations and the attorney and investigator defending her. Turow’s other books include Ultimate Punishment: A Lawyer’s Reflections on Dealing with the Death Penalty (2003). He also edited the two-volume Guilty As Charged: A Mystery Writers of America Anthology (1996, 1997).

Law career and suits against Meta and Google

In addition to pursuing his writing career, Turow continued to practice law. In 1986 he joined a private firm, where he focused on white-collar crimes and pro bono work. He served as president of the Authors Guild in 2010–14.

In 2026 Turow along with several publishers filed a class-action lawsuit against Meta and its CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, for copyright infringement. The suit alleges that Meta AI knowingly used millions of stolen written materials from pirate websites to train the language models of its artificial intelligence (AI) program, Llama. Turow told NPR,

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All Americans should understand that the bold future promised by AI has been, to paraphrase the investigative writer Alex Reisner, created with stolen words. It is all the more shameful that these violations of the law were undertaken by one of the richest corporations in the world.

Later that year Turow and several publishers filed a similar lawsuit against Google.