An American author and lawyer, born in Chicago, Illinois, United States, to a family of Belarusian origins. He attended New Trier High School and graduated from Amherst College in 1970. He then received an Edith Mirrielees Fellowship from the Creative Writing Center at Stanford University. He later became a Jones lecturer at Stanford, joined Harvard Law School, and wrote "One L" in 1977. He's known for Presumed Innocent (1990) and The Burden of Proof (1992).