This article uses the nationally representative State Court Processing Statistics on felony defendants to analyze how judges decide if defendants should be held pretrial. We find a large (11 percentage points) racial gap in hold rates within a county. Judicial decisions are significantly influenced by the probability that the defendant will be rearrested pretrial for a violent felony. Controlling for this probability causes the racial gap in hold rates to disappear. Bail amounts follow the same pattern. The most plausible sources of bias—mismeasurement of the control probabilities or selection bias—likely either do not matter or cause an upward bias.

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In legal education, professors often wish to go beyond the black letter law to challenge students with unresolved legal questions. Professors' main goal in the classroom-as effected through the Socratic method or otherwise-is to help students learn to think critically about these questions to arrive at reasonable and thoughtful answers. But what about the questions that require more than classroom discussion-those that demand the application of various accepted research methods such as surveys, data mining, experimentation, and the like-to analyze trends or behavior in hopes of finding acceptable solutions to hard questions? My remarks here discuss the idea of lifting the various research techniques professors often employ in scholarship and using those methods as a teaching tool to provide answers to important questions. Highlighting different approaches to answering a research question can be a unique pedagogical tool in the quest to help students learn to think critically and question the information they receive. *Business crime is one area in which highlighting different research methods can be especially useful. Within the ambit of the phrase "business crime" falls a broad array of illicit activity, including fraud, tax evasion, and money laundering, among other nefarious ventures. Because of the degree of secrecy and sophistication that are the hallmarks of such schemes, business crimes can be difficult to investigate. As such, exposing students to various research methodologies can be helpful when trying to guide them toward thinking about what solutions to big-picture problems are reasonable and workable in practice. It may also help them to more critically evaluate statistics or better research cases in legal practice. One study that a team of researchers (Michael Findley, Daniel Nielson and Jason Sharman) and I undertook (reported in two recent articles) will hopefully provide a useful illustration of how students can benefit from learning about different research methods in studying business crime. Both articles, Does International Law Matter?' and Funding Terror, 2 came about due to a desire to Associate Professor, University of Utah College of Law. Special thanks to Ellen Podgor for organizing an engaging and informative discussion of pedagogy on federal criminal law and business crimes.