Professionals offer (and, we hope, deliver) honest and competent judgment. Perspectives has devoted many issues to the first of these, honesty, what we tend to call "professional ethics:' We have had little to say about the second, technical competence, what makes honest judgment professional. We have, it seems, simply taken it for granted. Yet, an engineer without engineering judgment, a lawyer without a lawyer's judgment, or any other professional without the particular form of judgment distinguishing his or her profession from all others, would be an incompetent "layman" who could not honestly practice the profession in question.

What is professional judgment? It is, of course, good judgment-good enough at least to make us want it instead of lay judgment. But what makes judgment good (in the way professional judgment is supposed to be)? One witty answer is: "Good judgment comes from experience; experience, from bad judgment." The pieces that follow suggest that we may not yet have a better answer.

That, of course, is not all bad-if it leads us to think more about professional judgment. While we cannot walk well if we think about walking as we walk, we cannot learn to walk better if we do not think about walking at all. If good judgment comes from bad judgement, only through reflection can the transformation be accomplished.

Edwin Delattre, our first contributor, argues that good judgment is everywhere essentially the same -and the essence is good character. A professor of education (and now a dean too), Delatrre makes his case using the police as his example. This is not as odd as it may appear. Delattre has studied police for a long time and recently published a book on the subject. The police he describes are not those showing bad judgment-as in the beating of Rodney King last March-but those who act as they should. On Delattre's analysis, police judgment, good police judgment, rests on such familiar virtues of character as honesty, humility, and decisiveness. Training apparently plays only a subsidiary role.

Billy Koen's description of engineering judgment has a different emphasis. In place of character, he puts "heuristics" and "rules of thumb." A good engineer, an engineer exercising good engineering judgment, satisfies the state of the art defining engineering practice at the time. Good judgment for a particular engineer is judgment meeting the standard of his or her profession. It is inherently a professional judgment, good because it satisfies standards set by the profession, standards that (presumably) must be learned. Engineers do not think like other people. Other people think in Platonic terms, seeking ideal solutions. Engineers merely optimize.

Arthur Elstein's description of good judgment in medicine is surprisingly close to Koen's. Good clinical judgment, like good engineering judgment, optimizes (that is, tries to maximize expected utility). But empirical research into clinical judgment is more advanced than such research into engineering judgment. (I first realized this reading Elsteins anthology, Professional Judgment). That is why Elstein knows something Keen does not, that many physicians will reject the optimizing answer to a clinical problem even when they fully understand what is being suggested.

In Koen’s terms, the state of the art is itself controversial. For physicians (and perhaps for engineers), considerations other than expected utility seem relevant even after considerable reflection. Elstein thus forces us to distinguish sharply between what the state of the art may in fact be and what it should be. That in turn forces us to ask what should be taught as state of the art and what should be the measure of competent judgment.

David Van Zandt continually averts to these questions as he reviews a century of theorizing about judicial judgment. There are at least four "models" of judicial judgment, each a way of picturing what judges do and generally also a recommendation concerning what judges should do. While none quite fits the views of Delattre, Keen, or Elstein, there are enough similarities to invite reflection. For example, Delattre's emphasis on character brings his model of police judgment close to Van Zandt's third, that of practical reason. Are Van Zandt's criticism of that model also criticisms of Delattre's? Perhaps, but Van Zandt's own position is also close to Delattre's. For Van Zandt, a judge simply brings ordinary modes of reasoning (ordinary intellectual virtues) to court cases.