The Place of Facts in a World of Values

Abstract

I was sitting in my office at UCLA one beautiful fall morning in 1976 when there was a knock on my door. I opened it to see a young man in a dark three-piece suit. Dressed like that I knew he wasn’t a student or a faculty member. Must be a book salesman, bibles or encylopedias; thought he was in the social sciences building. I was wrong on all counts. He handed me a summons. I was being sued for $3,500,000 by a Richard Roe as part of a class action suit brought by Mark and Linda Sobell in the name of the former patients in their Patton State Hospital study. Additional defendents were Mary Pendery, Jack Fox who was the chief clinical psychologist at Patton, the medical director of Patton, the hospital, and UCLA, etc. When I closed my office door I didn’t realize that I was opening the door to a new career. How did I get into such a pickle? Entirely by chance.