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Most Americans know that discrimination on the basis of race, sex, and religion is unlawful. Seems simple enough. But advertisements in the back of newspapers still announce: "Single White Female Seeks Single White Male?" Isn't that discrimination on the basis of race and sex? Most businesses don't consider men for women's locker room or bathroom attendant. And why aren't those men and women's bathrooms and locker rooms illegal segregation? After all we know what would happened if some business set up separate bathrooms for blacks and whites. Isn't it discrimination for an employer to insist that men wear a jacket and tie and women wear nylons and a skirt? Why are some forms of discrimination unlawful and others not? Why is discrimination against short people, overweight people, or people with annoying personalities not against the law? We will answer these and many other questions by looking at court cases, legal theory, and philosophy. We may also have conversations with guest lecturers who work in civil rights enforcement, and the seminar may include a field trip to visit the offices of civil rights lawyers (lawyers tend to be busy people so these opportunities will depend on their schedules). Class participation and a short final paper are required, but here are no prerequisites other than an open mind and a willingness to delve into unfamiliar material.

Guns, Drugs, Abortion, Capital Punishment, Policing and Prisons, and Other Uncontroversial Topics in the Empirical Evaluation of Law and Policy Do guns make us safer? Can mass shootings be stopped? What is the true cost of the war on drugs and is legalization the answer? Why does the US have the most prisoners in the world and what are the social ramifications? Did the legalization of abortion reduce crime in the 1990s? Did capital punishment? Is the criminal justice system racially biased? These are some of the questions we will address by reading major empirical studies evaluating the impact of law and policy in the arena of criminal justice. This course has been modified from my law school course so that it is accessible to those with little or no statistical or economic background but who are willing to grapple with the intuitions behind such studies, which will be a main focus of the course readings. The seminar should appeal to anyone interested in understanding core issues in criminal justice policy, the challenges in answering empirical questions with data, and the intuition behind the statistical techniques that define the credibility revolution in empirical evaluation. The goal is to help students be more aware that many beliefs and policy positions are based on factual premises for which the empirical support is weak or nonexistent, or even directly contradictory, and how better to empirically ascertain truths about the world and align them with our policy preferences. Successful completion of the course will enable students to more effectively understand and critically evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of the empirical studies that constantly appear in the media and policy discourse, to comprehend the challenges in establishing true causal relationships in the fields of law, policy, and medicine, and to better understand how ideologues and motivated researchers contribute to the vast array of conflicting studies in these domains.