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 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.