A Special Role for Lawyers in a Social Norm Change Movement: From Tobacco Control to Childhood Obesity Prevention

The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF) has committed $500 million to reverse the childhood obesity epidemic by 2015. To accomplish this ambitious goal, RWJF and its partners have developed a movement to tackle childhood obesity as a societal problem, calling for population-based solutions. The movement is borrowing from the “social norm change” approach that has yielded tremendous public health gains in tobacco control. The goal of a social norm change movement is to influence behavior indirectly by creating a social environment and legal climate in which harmful products and conduct become less desirable, acceptable, and attainable. This article explains the social norm change approach that has driven the highly effective tobacco control movement in California, highlights a unique role that lawyers have played in this approach, and describes how lawyers are preparing to play a similar part in the movement to prevent childhood obesity.