Well. Okay. That headline may be a bit strong. But Malcolm Gladwell’s New Yorker piece on Enron certainly has definitely brought the issue of Jeff Skilling’s conviction and incredibly harsh sentence back into public discussion. At least if "people writing on the internet" counts as "public discussion."
Some recent responses:
• Larry Ribstein asks: “So how about this angle -- although we still don't know exactly what Skilling did wrong (if anything), he'll be rotting in jail for a generation...I've already pointed out a zillion times that the criminal laws were wildly inappropriate to deal with this case. Just maybe Gladwell's found a way to say it that people will finally listen to, even if they don't really understand it.”
• Houston attorney Tom Kirkendell is even more blunt: “Reading Gladwell's account along side this earlier post on the case against Jeff Skilling, is there really any meaningful doubt that an enormous injustice has occurred in regard to the conviction and sentencing of Skilling to 24 years in prison?”
• Michael Statsny says there probably isn’t some legislative solution to the problem of a Gladwellian mystery: “Inevitably, disclosure requirements just increase the amount of bureaucratic information produced. What you want is only the pertinent information revealed, but you can't legislate that, so you get lots of verbiage instead.”
• And there’s more from Point of Law and Conglomerate.
Posted by BrianVan, Jan 04, 2007 1:41AM
Interesting picture with all those overbearing phallic elements. (Reader exercise - see if you can find them all) Good work finding it.