In 1997 the American Society of Criminology (ASC) received a request for a friend-of-the-court brief in support of an experimental evaluation of a court-mandated counseling program for domestic offenders in Broward County, Fla. (see Feder, 1998). The experiment was opposed by the prosecuting attorney in the jurisdiction where it was to be conducted. The prosecutor claimed that the experiment was a judicial misuse of discretion and that it was unethical to deny treatment based on chance (random assignment). An e-mail poll of ASC board members yielded virtually unanimous support for Dr. Feder's request for the experiment, providing only for careful review of any such brief. Although the brief was never prepared or filed (the experiment was permitted without the necessity of the brief), the ASC board believed that a fundamental principle was at stake and that scholarly societies such as the ASC have an obligation to uphold it. The principle is that random assignment to treatment options is the best scientific method for determining the effectiveness of options such as those proposed in this case. This is not to argue that other methods of evaluation are not valuable; for example, in evaluating the effects of changes in laws or of area-based interventions, a quasi-experimental evaluation may be the best feasible design, because it is not possible to assign a large enough number of areas to achieve the benefits of randomization in equating conditions. 1 references