The book began with the observation that while social order may be regulated from above by the law, its foundation is built on norms and customs. The law's ability to promote a just and effective social order can never be fully understood without taking account of the concurrent influence of these informal social practices. In spite of this, as noted at the outset, much jurisprudential writing has been devoid of sustained discussion of norms and customs, focusing instead on individuals and governments. In concentrating on the small individual belowand the vast, looming state above, those intermediate objects of the social world – norms and customs – were long neglected by mainstream legal analysis.

The recent law and norms literature has begun to fill this gap. This emerging literature draws on important work emanating from the social sciences as well as from moral and political philosophy, and to a lesser extent from evolutionary biology and anthropology. Nearly all the new work by legal scholars utilizes rational choice methodology. The foregoing discussion also presented an analysis in the rational choice tradition albeit one that incorporated irreducible moral elements into the analysis. One of the underlying themes of the book was the compatibility of rational and moral analysis. The demonstration of this compatibility promises to be important in paving the way to an interdisciplinary norms account.

Chapter One defended what I referred to as the pattern conception of norms against the dominant rule conception. I argued that the traditional conception of norms as rulelike linguistic entities was faulty.