Terry A. Maroney

Robert S. and Theresa L. Reder Chair in Law
Professor of Medicine, Health and Society

Terry Maroney investigates the intersection of law and emotion. She is also a scholar of criminal law, with specializations in wrongful convictions and in juvenile justice. Professor Maroney’s work on the role of emotion in judicial behavior and decision-making forms the backbone of her scholarly focus. Weaving legal analysis together with the psychology, sociology and philosophy of emotion, her work illuminates how emotional experiences, dynamics, and their management interact with the constraints and demands of varied judicial roles, with deep implications for judges and the public they serve. Maroney’s many publications in this area—which include "(What We Talk About When We Talk About) Judicial Temperament," "Angry Judges," "Emotional Regulation and Judicial Behavior" and "The Persistent Cultural Script of Judicial Dispassion"—have been widely read among the U.S. judiciary. She frequently consults with and presents to judicial audiences in both the United States and abroad. With Judge Jeremy Fogel (now retired) and the Federal Judicial Center, she co-founded a novel intensive seminar focused on the human side of judging, now offered regularly to mid-career federal judges. 

Before becoming a law professor, Maroney was a litigator with WilmerHale and a Skadden Fellow at the Urban Justice Center, both in New York City; she draws on that practice experience—which included a high-profile triple exoneration, U.S. Supreme Court advocacy, and direct representation of children—in her teaching and writing. A 1998 summa cum laude graduate of New York University School of Law, Maroney clerked for Judge Amalya L. Kearse on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, has held academic fellowships at the law schools of NYU and the University of Southern California, and from 2016-17 was the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University. At Vanderbilt she was a 2017-19 Chancellor Faculty Fellow and received a 2019-21 Discovery Grant. She joined the Vanderbilt Law faculty in 2006 and was appointed to the Robert S. and Theresa L. Reder Chair in Law in 2021.

Representative Publications

• "The Rise of Affectivism," Nature Human Behavior (2021) (with David Dukes et al.)
  Full Text | WWW
• "(What We Talk About When We Talk About) Judicial Temperament," 61 Boston College Law Review 2085 (2020)
  Full Text | SSRN
• "Empirically Investigating Judicial Emotion," 9 Oñati Socio-Legal Series 799 (2019)
  Full Text | SSRN
• "The Once and Future Juvenile Brain" in Choosing the Future of Juvenile Justice, NYU Press (2014) (Franklin Zimring and David Tanenhaus, editors)
  Full Text | SSRN
• “Angry Judges,” 65 Vanderbilt Law Review 1207 (2012)
  Full Text | SSRN | HEIN
• "Emotional Regulation and Judicial Behavior," 99 California Law Review 1485 (2011)
  Full Text | SSRN | HEIN
• "The Persistent Cultural Script of Judicial Dispassion," 99 California Law Review 629 (2011)
  Full Text | SSRN | HEIN
• "Emotional Common Sense as Constitutional Law," 62 Vanderbilt Law Review 851 (2009)
  Full Text | SSRN | HEIN
• "Emotional Competence, 'Rational Understanding' and the Criminal Defendant," 43 American Criminal Law Review 1375 (2006)
  Full Text | SSRN
• “Law and Emotion: A Proposed Taxonomy of an Emerging Field,” 30 Law and Human Behavior 119 (2006)
  Full Text | SSRN