Terry A. Maroney

Professor of Law
Professor of Medicine, Health and Society

Terry Maroney’s research focuses primarily on the role of emotion in law. She was selected as a Fellow of the Center for Advanced Study in Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University to pursue a theoretical and empirical investigation on the role of emotion in judicial behavior and decision-making and continued that work as a 2017-19 Vanderbilt University Chancellor’s Faculty Fellow. Her scholarship on judges’ emotions—including “Angry Judges,” “Emotional Regulation and Judicial Behavior” and “The Persistent Cultural Script of Judicial Dispassion”—has been widely read by both judges and scholars of judicial behavior. Professor Maroney works closely with the Federal Judicial Center, both offering regular emotion-regulation workshops for newly-appointed federal judges and co-directing the annual Mid-Career Seminar for U.S. District Judges, an innovative program she developed with Judge Jeremy Fogel, who directs the FJC. She has worked on issues of emotion and its regulation with state court judges as well, in jurisdictions ranging from Alaska to Florida, and frequently lectures on these topics internationally. In her work, Professor Maroney relies heavily on interdisciplinary research, particularly psychology. Reflecting both that interdisciplinary grounding and her legal practice experience, she has also written and lectured extensively on juvenile justice topics, particularly adolescent brain science. She is an inaugural member of the editorial board of Affective Science, the journal of the Society for Affective Science, which was launched in 2019. Professor Maroney teaches a course on wrongful conviction, another area in which she has practiced. Prior to joining Vanderbilt's law faculty in 2006, she held academic fellowships at New York University School of Law and the University of Southern California Gould School of Law, litigated at WilmerHale, served as a Skadden Fellow at the Urban Justice Center, and clerked for Judge Amalya L. Kearse on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. Before earning her J.D. summa cum laude at New York University, she worked as a rape crisis counselor, HIV educator and advocate for crime victims.

Representative Publications

• "A Field Evolves: Introduction to the Special Section on Law and Emotion," 8:1 Emotion Review 3 (2016) (co-editor, with Susan A. Bandes, of Special Section)
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• "Emotion and Reason in Judicial Decision Making," in Recht Fühlen (Sandra Schnädelbach et al. eds., Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 2016)
  
• “Angry Judges,” 65 Vanderbilt Law Review 1207 (2012)
  Full Text | SSRN | HEIN
• "The Once and Future Juvenile Brain," in Choosing the Future of Juvenile Justice (Franklin Zimring & David Tanenhaus eds., NYU Press, 2014)
• "As a Father Shows Compassion for His Children: Ancient and Contemporary Perspectives on Judicial Empathy," 3 Journal of Law, Religion and State 239 (2014) (with Phillip Ackerman-Lieberman)
• "The Persistent Cultural Script of Judicial Dispassion," 99 California Law Review 629 (2011)
  Full Text | SSRN | HEIN
• "Emotional Regulation and Judicial Behavior," 99 California Law Review 1485 (2011)
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• "Emotional Common Sense as Constitutional Law," 62 Vanderbilt Law Review 851 (2009)
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• "The False Promise of Adolescent Brain Science in Juvenile Justice," 85 Notre Dame Law Review 89 (2009)
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• “Law and Emotion: A Proposed Taxonomy of an Emerging Field,” 30 (2) Law and Human Behavior 119 (2006)
  Full Text | SSRN