A few folks have commented about how the most recent bunch of Supreme Court cases tended to cite academic studies quite a bit. At the Volokh Conspiracy, for example, David Bernstein noted that District of Columbia v. Heller took a good look at the historical literature.

(Shameless plug: Read my commentary on Heller in The American Spectator here and here.)

The death-penalty case Baze v. Rees looked at research into whether capital punishment deters crime — unfortunately, the authors of studies cited by both sides <a href=”http://freakonomics.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/06/30/how-the-supreme-court-misread-my-research-empirics-and-the-death-penalty/-2775″>think the court misread what they found.