The publication of an inter-disciplinary effort on child welfare law, co-authored by three such luminary figures as Joseph Goldstein (Walton Hale Hamilton Professor of Law, Science and Social Policy at Yale University Law School), Anna Freud (perhaps the foremost living authority on the emotional lives of children), and Albert Solnit (Director of the Yale University Child Study Center), is an intellectual event. The talents of these authors are such that their book, Beyond the Best Interests of the Child (1973), ought to have significance beyond its reconceptualization of the law of child custody; it ought also to be a landmark in the history of cooperation between social scientists and lawyers. Despite impressive achievements, however, the book's greatest utility may be as an example of the wrong way to employ social science to solve problems of social policy.