Terry Maroney has been named to the Robert S. and Theresa L. Reder Chair in Law.
Maroney’s appointment to the newly endowed chair was announced by Chris Guthrie, Dean and John Wade-Kent Syverud Professor of Law. The chair was endowed by Robert S. Reder ’78, a retired partner of Milbank in New York who teaches at the Law School as a professor of the practice of law, and his wife, Theresa L. Reder. Reder established the chair in 2017 in recognization of the education he received at Vanderbilt Law School and in support of his faculty colleagues.
“Terry Maroney’s scholarly work on how emotions influence judicial behavior has yielded important insights and was also the impetus for a pioneering training program for federal judges,” said Chris Guthrie, Dean and John Wade-Kent Syverud Professor of Law. “She is also a valued teacher and mentor to students interested in careers in criminal and social justice. I’m grateful to Bob and Terri Reder for enabling us to acknowledge Terry’s scholarly and institutional contributions with a well-deserved chair appointment.”
Maroney’s scholarly work investigates the intersection of law and emotion, particularly the role of emotion in judicial behavior and decision-making. 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 scholarly articles—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, Maroney co-founded a novel intensive seminar focused on the human side of judging, which is now offered regularly to mid-career federal judges.
She is also a scholar of criminal law, with specializations in wrongful convictions and in juvenile justice. She holds a secondary appointment as a professor of medicine, health and society at Vanderbilt University.
Before entering the legal academy, 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.
She is a summa cum laude graduate of New York University School of Law and clerked for Judge Amalya L. Kearse on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. She 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.
Maroney teaches Criminal Law, Juvenile Justice and Actual Innocence and is affiliated with the George Barrett Social Justice and Criminal Justice programs.