Empirical debates are often crucial to decisions by judges and policymakers. This course will focus on some of these debates with the goal of both informing students on the substantive issues and helping them to develop the ability to understand and evaluate empirical studies by reading major studies on the issues of guns, drugs, prisons and a variety of other hotly contested empirical issues in law and policy. Although we will be reading actual statistical/econometric studies, there is no pre-requisite for the class since it is not a hard-core quantitative empirical methods class, but rather is designed to develop the ability to be a thoughtful consumer of empirical research. The goal is to provide information that judges, litigators, policymakers, and informed citizens would find useful in understanding the strengths and weaknesses of empirical evidence. The final in-class exam will involve a critique of an actual empirical paper. One page comment papers will be written for each class. Depending on the size of the class, we may also have student presentations of certain papers.