Problem Solving, Decision Making, and Professional Judgment A Guide for Lawyers and Policymakers

Problem Solving, Decision Making, and Professional Judgment: A Guide for Lawyers and Policymakers will prepare students and professionals for their roles as creative problem solvers. Paul Brest and Linda Hamilton Krieger discuss essential qualities of practical wisdom that are important across disciplines and essential to one's everyday life as a decisionmaker, consumer, and citizen. This book can stand alone as a text or work as a supplement to a core law or public policy curriculum. Professor Brest and Professor Krieger aim to prepare students to exercise problem solving and decision making skills in the complex social environments in which they will work. They include bodies of knowledge drawn from statistics, decision science, social and cognitive psychology, and "judgment and decision making" (JDM) psychological literature. They combine quantitative approaches to empirical analysis and decisionmaking (statistics and decision science) with the psychological literature that demonstrates the systematic errors of the intuitive and social empiricist or decisionmaker. Their ultimate goal is to help readers "get it right" in their roles as professionals, citizens, and individuals.

Paul Brest is professor emeritus and former Dean of Stanford Law School. He is President of the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation in Menlo Park, California. He teaches a graduate course on Judgment and Decision Making at Stanford University.
Linda Hamilton Krieger is a Professor of Law and Director of the Ulu Lehua Scholars Program at the William S. Richardson School of Law in Honolulu, Hawai'i and is a Senior Research Fellow at the Center for the Study of Law and Society at the University of California, Berkeley.