Turow was born in Chicago, attended New Trier High School, and graduated from Amherst College in 1970. He received an Edith Mirrielees Fellowship to the Stanford University Creative Writing Center, where he attended from 1970 to 1972. In 1971, he married Annette Weisberg, a painter.

Scott Turow later became a Jones Lecturer at Stanford, serving until 1975, when he entered Harvard Law School. In 1977, Turow wrote One L, a book about his first year at law school. After earning his Juris Doctor (J.D.) degree in 1978, Turow became an Assistant U.S. Attorney in Chicago, serving in that position until 1986. There he prosecuted several high-profile corruption cases, including the tax fraud case of state Attorney General William Scott. Turow also was lead counsel in Operation Greylord, the federal prosecution of Illinois judicial corruption cases.

After leaving the U.S. Attorney's office, Turow became a novelist, writing legal thrillers such as The Burden of Proof, Presumed Innocent, Pleading Guilty, and Personal Injuries, which Time Magazine named as the Best Fiction Novel of 1999. All four became bestsellers, and Turow won multiple literary awards, most notably the Silver Dagger Award of the British Crime Writers. Many of the characters appear in multiple books, and all of his novels take place in Kindle County. (The state is unspecified, but the county contains a tri-city conglomerate on the Mississippi between Chicago and New Orleans [Burden of Proof p. 52]; compare the "Quad Cities" on the Mississippi, [originally Davenport IA, Rock Island IL, Moline IL, and East Moline IL, but now also including Bettendorf IA].) In 1990, Turow was featured on the June 11 cover of Time magazine, which described him as the "Bard of the Litigious Age." In 1995, Canadian author Derek Lundy published a biography of Turow, entitled Scott Turow: Meeting the Enemy (ECW Press, 1995). In the 1990s a British publisher bracketed Turow’s work with that of Margaret Atwood and John Irving, republished in the series Bloomsbury Modern Library.

Turow is the president of the Authors Guild. He was also President from 1997 to 1998 and has served on its board.

From 1997 to 1998 Turow was a member of the U.S. Senate Nominations Commission for the Northern District of Illinois, which recommends federal judicial appointments.

Turow is a partner of the Chicago law firm of Sonnenschein Nath & Rosenthal. Turow works pro bono in most of his cases, including a 1995 case where he won the release of Alejandro Hernandez, who had spent 11 years on death row for a murder he did not commit. He was also appointed to the commission considering the reform of the Illinois death penalty by former Governor George Ryan and is currently a member of the Illinois State Police Merit Board. He and his wife Annette divorced in late 2008 with three grown children.

Fiction

• Presumed Innocent, 1987
• The Burden of Proof, 1990
• Pleading Guilty, 1993
• The Laws of Our Fathers, 1996
• Guilty As Charged, 1996 (as editor)
• Personal Injuries, 1999
• Reversible Errors, 2002
• Ordinary Heroes, 2005
• Limitations, 2006
• Innocent, 2010 ISBN 978-0446562423

Non-fiction

• One L, 1977
• A Lawyer's Reflections on Dealing with the Death Penalty, 2003