1. After he graduated from Harvard Law School in 1980, Turner landed a corporate law job at Fulbright & Jaworski (now Norton Rose Fulbright), according to the Harvard Magazine profile last year. Three years later, he struck out on his own with two other young African-American lawyers: Barry Barnes and fellow Harvard Law graduate Rosemarie Morse. The firm, then known as Barnes & Turner, occasionally represented corporations, but according to Harvard Magazine, the clients were generally smaller, black-owned businesses. Recounted Barnes, who has run the firm since Turner resigned to become mayor: “Sylvester was just starting a family and so was I, so there were people who relied on us.”
2. Fellow 1980 graduates of Harvard Law include: U.S. Senator Mark Warner, D-Virginia, Duquesne University president and former law school dean Ken Gormley; Connecticut Attorney General George Jepsen; Lindsay Conner, head of Manatt, Phelps & Phillips’ film, television and digital content practice group in Los Angeles; Harold Koh, the former dean of Yale Law School dean and legal advisor to the the State Department under President Obama; U.S. Rep. Jim Cooper, D-Tennessee; U.S. District Judge Geoffrey Crawford of Vermont. Two of Turner’s professors at the University of Houston “convinced me to attend Harvard Law School,” Sylvester once recalled. The Harvard Magazine profilesaid Turner didn’t know a single lawyer before he applied to law school—and that what he knew about the law came from watching shows such as Perry Mason.
