Malcolm Gladwell (Photo by Charley Gallay/Getty Images for Netflix)
Malcolm Gladwell built a career out of making facially unconventional yet ultimately fairly obvious connections and allowing the lowest common denominator of American society dub him a genius for it. Oh, Sesame Street is successful because its content is memorable? Give this guy a unique haircut — more “stickiness” — and declare him a public intellectual with all the guest spots with Bill Simmons that title entails.
The problem is Gladwell’s “expertise,” such as it is, rests on compiling research from actual experts and then spitting it back packaged as some kind of novel revelation. It does not, for example, extend to his observations about the criminal justice system. Speaking at Penn State yesterday — you already see where this is going — Gladwell opined:
And this is the Tipping Point where we all need to come together and admit that blithely recategorizing straightforward stuff doesn’t make someone smart.
There was, in fact, nothing unbalanced or egregious about the prosecutors in the Sandusky case. And that’s saying something, because prosecutors are unbalanced and egregious all the time but they were pretty by the book in this case. Gladwell’s entirely amateur legal reasoning comes from his new book Talking To Strangers where he relitigates the Sandusky case based on a psychologist saying that people generally trust each other and therefore Joe Paterno and Penn State administrators should deserve public sympathy that Sandusky duped them when they trusted his denials.
I’m sure they were inclined to trust the guy they knew… but that wasn’t their job. These weren’t random folks on the street, they were university officials paid handsomely — in Paterno’s case very handsomely — to protect the school. That’s where they owed their duty and that’s why they faced repercussions.
There may be problems with the criminal law, but we’ve gotten this system by and large through decades, if not centuries, of evolution. The burdens placed on the Penn State administration reflect the wisdom of generations of legal professionals. It’s not something to throw out because someone slapped together a dime store attempt at a Brandeis brief based on one psychologist. If anything, the right lesson to take from that psychologist’s work is “people tend to trust folks and that can be dangerous so the law should situate some people with the responsibility to exercise critical judgment.”
Sometimes cutting against conventional wisdom is the sign of a bold thinker. Sometimes it’s the sign of an ill-informed poser collecting speaking fees and book deals. Figuring out where to draw that line is pretty important.
Earlier: Harvard Law School Is Full Of Druggies: A Conversation Between Malcolm Gladwell & Lance Armstrong
Joe Patrice is a senior editor at Above the Law and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer. Feel free to email any tips, questions, or comments. Follow him on Twitter if you’re interested in law, politics, and a healthy dose of college sports news. Joe also serves as a Managing Director at RPN Executive Search.