Learning from Experience: The Impact of Research about Family Support Programs on Public Policy

Do public policies reflect the experiences of people who implement them or those who are supposed to benefit from them? This kind of question may seem remote from the work of an appellate judge, and yet Judge David Bazelon's abiding interest in the links and gaps between social science and law grew from concern with this basic question. I will focus on a particular social welfare program as I explore the failure of public policy to respond to social science findings. For those who did not know Judge Bazelon, however, here is a fuller explanation of why I chose this topic for this symposium honoring the Judge. One day while I was clerking for Judge Bazelon, a classmate clerking at another court conjectured that the appellate world of the D.C. Circuit was narrow, given its focus on the records of administrative actions and its cloistered setting. I found myself replying that the world of Judge Bazelon was the opposite of narrow. I regaled my friend with the list of journalists, scientists, social scientists, and authors who had come either to chambers or to lunch with the Judge and his clerks to discuss topics ranging from the psychological dimensions of risk assessment to international responses to American television. Indeed, it was a heady world. Judge Bazelon drew a variety of intriguing people into his orbit and engaged them immediately in the opposite of small talk. We would sit at the round table in the Judge's office, munching on cookies and pretzels, while the Judge pressed a visitor for answers about the origins of crime, relationships between reason and emotion, or the political dimensions of ostensibly scientific evidence. In these sessions, Judge Bazelon manifested his enduring ambivalence about experts. On the one hand, he looked to them