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.

In 1993, Kahan joined the faculty of the University of Chicago Law School where he worked with Elena Kagan.

Karl Llewellyn attributed this ability to what he called "situation sense", an intuitive perceptive faculty borne of immersion in professional and cultural norms.

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.

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.

The public expects punishment not only to deter crime and to impose deserved suffering, but also to make accurate statements about what the community values.

Imprisonment has been and continues to be Americans' punishment of choice for serious offenses because of the resonance of liberty deprivation as a symbol of condemnation in our culture.

He uses expressive theory to explain why the American public has consistently rejected proposals to restore corporal punishment, a form of discipline that offends egalitarian moral sensibilities; and why the public is now growing increasingly receptive to shaming punishments, which unlike conventional alternative sanctions signal condemnation unambiguously.

He has been cited on NBC News' Today Show and in such publications as the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal for his views on alternative sanctions.

Thus, as legislators expand liability for date rape, domestic violence, and drunk driving, police become less likely to arrest, prosecutors to charge, jurors to convict, and judges to sentence severely.

Kahan presents a formal model of this strategy for norm reform, illustrates it with real-world examples, and identifies its normative and prescriptive implications.

Drawing on an extensive social science literature, he shows that deterrence arguments in fact have little impact on citizens' views on controversial policies such as capital punishment, gun control, and hate crime laws.

Citizens conventionally defend their positions in deterrence terms nonetheless only because the alternative is a highly contentious expressive idiom, which social norms, strategic calculation, and liberal morality all condemn.