Problem Solving, Decision Making, and Professional Judgment

Paul Brest is the President of the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation in Menlo Park, California. Mr. Brest received an A.B. from Swarthmore College in 1962 and an LL.B from Harvard Law School in 1965. He served as law clerk to Judge Bailey Aldrich and Supreme Court Justice John M. Harlan, and practiced with the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Inc., in Jackson, Mississippi, doing civil rights litigation before joining the Stanford Law School faculty in 1969, where his research and teaching focused on constitutional law and problem solving/decision making. From 1987 to 1999, he served as the dean of Stanford Law School. Mr. Brest is co-author of Processes of Constitutional Decisionmaking (5th ed. 2006), and currently teaches a course on Judgment and Decisionmaking in a graduate program in Public Policy at Stanford University. Linda Hamilton Krieger is a lawyer, law professor, organization development facilitator, and social activist who has long worked to help individuals and progressive community organizations improve their strategic decision making by incorporating into their thinking insights from cognitive social psychology, statistics, and organization theory. Professor Krieger received her A.B. from Stanford University in 1975, and a J.D. from the New York University School of Law in 1978. She practiced as a civil rights lawyer in San Francisco from 1978 to 1996. During that time she also helped found and govern three nonprofit community organizations emerging in response to the HIV/AIDS, including the San Francisco AIDS Foundation, the AIDS Interfaith Network, Hale Laulima, and the San Francisco Gay Bar Association's AIDS Legal Referral Service.

PART ONE
INTRODUCTION TO PROBLEM SOLVING AND DECISIONMAKING

Chapter 0. Preface

Chapter 1. The Lawyer and Policymaker as Problem solver and Decisionmaker: The Roles of Deliberation, Intuition, and Expertise

Chapter 2. Framing Problems and Identifying Objectives And Identifying Problem Causes

Chapter 3. Generating Alternatives: Creativity in Legal and Policy Problem Solving

Chapter 4. Choosing Among Alternatives

PART TWO
Making Sense of an Uncertain World

Introduction to Part Two

Chapter 5. Introduction to Statistics and Probability

Chapter 6. Scores, Dollars, and Other Quantitative Variables

Chapter 7. Interpreting Statistical Results

Chapter 8. Explaining and predicting one-time events

Chapter 9. Biases in Perception and Memory

Chapter 10. Biases in Processing and Judging Information

Chapter 11. The Social Perceiver: Processes and Problems in Social Cognition

PART THREE
MAKING DECISIONS

Introduction to Part Three

Chapter 12. Choices, Consequences, and Tradeoffs

Chapter 13. Complexities of Decisionmaking: Relationships to our Future Selves

Chapter 14. Complexities of Decisionmaking: The Power of Frames

Chapter 15. Decisionmaking Under risk

Chapter 16. The Role of Affect in Risky Decisions

Conclusion to Part Three

Part Four
Influencing Decisions

Introduction to Part Four

Chapter 17: Social Influence

Chapter 18: Influencing Behavior Through Cognition

Chapter 19. Group Decisionmaking

Chapter 20. Conclusion: Learning from Experience