Dan Kahan

Dan M. Kahan is the Elizabeth K. Dollard Professor of Law at Yale Law School. His professional expertise is in the fields of criminal law and evidence, and he is known for his theory of cultural cognition.

After attending a boarding school in Vermont, Kahan received a BA summa cum laude from Middlebury College in 1986, where he studied under Murray Dry. While at Middlebury, he spent his junior year at Lincoln College, Oxford. He then received a JD magna cum laude from Harvard Law School in 1989, where he learned Tort Law from Lewis Sargentich and Criminal Law from Charles Ogletree. While at Harvard Law School, he served as president of the Harvard Law Review for volume 102.

After law school, Kahan served as a law clerk to Judge Harry T. Edwards of the United States Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit (1989–90) and then to Justice Thurgood Marshall of the U.S. Supreme Court (1990–91). After clerking, he worked as an attorney for Mayer, Brown & Platt in Washington D.C. (1991–93). In 1993, Kahan joined the faculty of the University of Chicago Law School where he worked with Elena Kagan. He joined the Yale Law School faculty in 1999. At Yale, he is one of the instructors in the Law School's Supreme Court Advocacy Clinic and a professor of Criminal Law and Administration. He is a recurring visiting professor at Harvard Law School ^{[citation needed]}.

He accepts the central tenets of legal realism.^{[citation needed]} As developed at Yale Law School in the 1920s and 1930s, legal realism was less interested in demonstrating that legal rules are formally indeterminate than to explain how lawyers nonetheless form such uniform and predictable understandings of what those rules entail. Karl Llewellyn attributed this ability to what he called "situation sense", an intuitive perceptive faculty borne of immersion in professional and cultural norms.

Kahan argues that when lawyers exercise professional judgment, and perform their professional responsibilities, they affirm the authority and extend the vitality of the norms that construct society's professional situation sense. However, law is not merely a set of rigid rules robotically applied. There is a complex, additional element of moral agency. The content of the lawyers' situation sense is inevitably contingent and dynamic: professional norms – and in turn the law itself – evolve in response to the evaluations lawyers make of the decisions and actions of each other. The only test of whether some lawyer has reliable situation sense is to see whether other lawyers (including decisionmakers) agree with that lawyer's perceptions of how society's rules should be applied.

Kahan is best known for his work on the cultural theory of risk. This research delves into cultural cognition, which is the study of how individuals form beliefs about the amount of risk in certain situations based on their preconceived cultural group identities. Most of this work is supported by empirical and statistical analyses of group responses to pre-created hypotheticals.

Project members use the methods of various disciplines—including social psychology, anthropology, communications, and political science—to chart the impact of this phenomenon and to identify the mechanisms through which it operates. The Project also has an explicit normative objective: to identify processes of democratic decisionmaking by which society can resolve culturally grounded differences in belief in a manner that is both congenial to persons of diverse cultural outlooks and consistent with sound public policymaking.

Kahan’s attitude towards shaming sanctions has changed from positive to negative over time. (According to his own article “ What's Really Wrong with Shaming Sanctions.”) At first, Kahan believed shaming penalties are on the rise in American law, and are an effective alternative to traditional punishments. This was especially feasible and valuable for federal white collar offenders. He developed a theoretical model that connects the deterrent efficacy of such penalties to their power to signal the undesirable propensities of wrongdoers and the desirable propensities of citizens who shun wrongdoers. He once believed the efficiency of such penalties is affected by their power to express publicly valued social meanings. However, he has renounced his previous defense made in article "What Do Alternative Sanctions Mean" for the shaming sanctions in his newer article "What's Really Wrong with Shaming Sanctions" since he considers the premise of his analysis flawed.("I renounce my previous defense of shaming penalties. Sort of. In What Do Alternative Sanctions Mean, 63 U. Chi. L. Rev. 591") In this article, he also says that "Drawing on work that I’ve done since then, I now acknowledge that the premise of this analysis was flawed. Ordinary citizens expect punishments not merely to condemn but to do so in ways that affirm rather than denigrate their core values. By ritualistically stigmatizing wrongdoers as transgressors of shared moral norms, shaming penalties grate against the sensibilities of persons who subscribe to egalitarian and individualistic worldviews."