Justin McCrary is the Paul J. Evanson Professor of Law at Columbia Law School. An economist by training, he is an empirical scholar who has published extensively on policing, crime, securities, antitrust, econometrics and statistics, and empirical methods in law.
McCrary is the founding director of the Social Sciences Data Laboratory, or “D-Lab,” at the University of California, Berkeley. He established D-Lab as the university’s center for innovation in training graduate students regarding quantitative social science generally and emerging “big data” techniques specifically. D-Lab also is the repository for several large-scale data collections, including confidential collections associated with the Census Research Data Centers.
From 2008 to 2018, McCrary was a member of the faculty at Berkeley Law School where he taught courses such as Business Associations; Litigation and Statistics; the Law and Economics of Discrimination; Quantitative Methods; and Race, Policing and Data Science. In 2011, the University of Chicago Press published his book, Controlling Crime: Strategies and Tradeoffs (co-edited with Phil Cook and Jens Ludwig).
Before teaching at Berkeley, McCrary was an assistant professor at the University of Michigan’s Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy and an assistant professor in the university’s economics department. He is also a faculty research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research, where he co-directs the Crime Working Group. He has received grants from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, the Arnold Foundation, and the Spencer Foundation.