Like many lawyers and law students, my holiday reading list studiously omits overtly legal topics. Well almost. I co-teach a course at the Law School called Quantitative Methodology, which drew me to Malcolm Gladwell’s book Outliers (Little Brown, 2008). In statistics, an “outlier” is an observation that is “markedly different” from others in the sample. Gladwell’s book is itself an outlier of sorts; how many books that revel in statistical analysis have been number one on the New York Times‘ nonfiction list? Part of the answer lies in Gladwell’s remarkably lucid writing style. What makes the book fascinating, however, is that Gladwell’s focus is not statistical concepts as such, but a particular kind of outlier, namely, successful people and the reasons for their success. And as I finish grading exams for the fall semester and prepare for the spring semester that starts on January 12 (today), the time is ripe to consider both success and failure. My comments below scratch just the surface of a more complex argument, but it will give you a sense of Gladwell’s purpose.

Gladwell’s book ranges widely over the domain of successes. Why are the best Canadian and Czech hockey players usually born between January and March? What explains the staggering success of a Bill Gates or Robert Oppenheimer while other even more brilliant types fade into obscurity? How come “gifted and talented” kids from the suburbs often do not fulfill the promise predicted by their IQ tests? Why are the socially disadvantaged children who attend the KIPP Academy in the South Bronx so good at math? And, for that matter, why is it that Asian children are also so much better at math than typical American kids? (Teaser: the answer lies not in genetics, but in culture and the language (literally) of mathematics.)