Terry A. Maroney

Professor of Law Professor of Medicine, Health and Society Co-director, Social Justice Program
Voice: (615) 343-3491
Fax: (615) 322-6631
Email: terry.maroney@vanderbilt.edu
Office: Room 288
View curriculum vitae (.pdf)
Links
- SSRN Page
- Social Justice Program
- Law & the Emotions conference
- Criminal Justice Program
- Cecil D. Branstetter Civil Litigation & Dispute Resolution Program
Area(s) of Expertise
Criminal law, juvenile justice, law and emotion, wrongful convictions
Research Interest(s)
Criminal law, juvenile justice, law and human behavior, law and emotion, law and neuroscience
Education
J.D. New York University
B.A. Oberlin College
Biography
Terry Maroney specializes in criminal law, juvenile justice and the role of emotion in law, drawing heavily on interdisciplinary scholarship. Her current work examines the impact of emotion on judicial decision making with the most recent article in this series, “Angry Judges,” published in the Vanderbilt Law Review. It follows “Emotional Regulation and Judicial Behavior” and "The Persistent Cultural Script of Judicial Dispassion," both of which appeared in the California Law Review, and her exploration of judges’ “emotional common sense” in the Vanderbilt Law Review. Professor Maroney has also examined the use of adolescent brain science in juvenile cases, a subject of great interest in light of the U.S. Supreme Court’s citation to such evidence in cases involving the juvenile death penalty and life without parole. Her other writings include a widely-read taxonomy of law-and-emotion scholarship; an article arguing that emotional dysfunction provides a legal basis for declaring a defendant incompetent, cited by justices of the Minnesota Supreme Court; and a frequently-cited note on hate crime. Drawing on her practice experience in exonerating the wrongly convicted, Professor Maroney recently inaugurated a class titled Actual Innocence. She joined Vanderbilt's law faculty in 2006 after serving as a law fellow at the University of Southern California Gould School of Law. Before her fellowship at USC, Professor Maroney was a Furman Fellow at New York University School of Law, a litigation associate at WilmerHale, and a Skadden Fellow at the Urban Justice Center. After earning her J.D. summa cum laude at New York University, she clerked for Judge Amalya L. Kearse on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. She spent six years working as a rape crisis counselor, HIV educator and advocate for crime victims before earning her law degree.
Representative Publications
Articles
“Angry Judges,” 65 Vanderbilt Law Review 1207 (2012)
"The Persistent Cultural Script of Judicial Dispassion," 99 California Law Review 629 (2011)
"Adolescent Brain Science After Graham v. Florida," 86 Notre Dame Law Review 765 (2011)
"Emotional Regulation and Judicial Behavior," 99 California Law Review 1485 (2011)
"Emotional Common Sense as Constitutional Law," 62 Vanderbilt Law Review 851 (2009)
"In Family Law, Love’s Got a Lot To Do with It: A Response to Phillip Shaver," 16 Virginia Journal of Social Policy and the Law 471 (2009)
"The False Promise of Adolescent Brain Science in Juvenile Justice," 85 Notre Dame Law Review 89 (2009)
"Unlearning Fear of Outgroup Others," 72 Law & Contemporary Problems 83 (2009)
“Emotional Competence, ‘Rational Understanding,' and the Criminal Defendant,” 43 American Criminal Law Review 1375 (2006)
“Law and Emotion: A Proposed Taxonomy of an Emerging Field,” 30 (2) Law and Human Behavior 119 (2006)
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