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American Association of Law Schools Annual Meeting
January
2-6, 2004
Hilton Atlanta
255 Courtland St, NE
Atlanta, GA
Our open program on Law and Communitarianism at the AALS annual meeting in Atlanta will
be on Monday, January 5, 2004, from 3:30 to 5:15 pm on the 2nd floor of the Atlanta Hilton.
“Norms, Mores & Law in a Communitarian Perspective”
Our object will be to present the panel’s insights about the importance of norms and mores as a
supplement or alternative to law in the regulation of human conduct. We will contrast at least
two views of norms and mores -- an efficiency explanation for their development and importance
and a view of them as normative expectations developed in and by communities. We will focus
on three topics. First will be issues of informal community policing, i.e., neighborhood watch
groups and the like. Next will be ideas of basic human rights, i.e., norms and understandings that
apply internationally across many cultures. Finally, we will consider official calls to report
suspicious behavior by potential terrorists -- calls that reflect a legitimate concern about a serious
problem -- but that might lead to what could be called the “dark side” of norms and mores, i.e.,
definition of threats in terms of ethnicity, religion or other characteristics that may be both
inefficient and ultimately destructive of community.
Panel:
Amitai Etzioni, The George Washington University
Dan Kahan, Yale University
Richard McAdams, University of Illinois, Yale University (visiting professor)
Joseph Sanders, University of Houston
Moderator: Thomas Morgan, The George Washington University
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