• jmonahan(at)virginia.edu

John Monahan, a psychologist, has been on the Law School faculty since 1980. He holds courtesy appointments as a Professor of Psychology in Arts and Sciences, and as a Professor of Psychiatry and Neurobehavioral Sciences in the Medical School. He now holds the John S. Shannon Distinguished Professorship in Law.

Monahan has been elected to membership in the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences, and has served on the Committee on Law and Justice of the National Research Council. He was the Reporter for the Committee on Rights and Engagement of the President's Commission on Mental Health. In 1989, he was a member of the State Department's Psychiatry Inspection Project, sent to determine whether political dissidents were being held in mental hospitals in the former Soviet Union.

He has been elected a Fellow of the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation and a Fellow of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences. He also has been a Visiting Fellow at Harvard Law School, Stanford Law School, New York University School of Law, All Souls College, Oxford, and the American Academy in Rome.

Monahan was the founding President of the American Psychological Association's Division of Psychology and Law, which now has over 2,000 members. In 1997, he received an honorary law degree from the City University of New York.  He has won the Distinguished Contribution to Research in Public Policy Award of the American Psychological Association and the Isaac Ray Career Award of the American Psychiatric Association.

Since 1986, Monahan has directed two large research projects in the area of mental health law. These projects, on which Richard Bonnie has also served, have been supported by grants from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.

Monahan is the author or editor of 15 books and has written over 200 articles and chapters. One of those books, Social Science in Law, co-authored by Larry Walker, is entering its 7^th edition and has just been published in Chinese. Two of his other books won the Manfred Guttmacher Award of the American Psychiatric Association for outstanding research in law and psychiatry: The Clinical Prediction of Violent Behavior in 1982 and Rethinking Risk Assessment in 2002.  His articles have been published in the Yale Law Journal, the Virginia Law Review, the University of Pennsylvania Law Review, the California Law Review, the Iowa Law Review, and the Southern California Law Review, among many others.

Monahan's work has been cited frequently by courts, including the California Supreme Court in the landmark Tarasoff v. Regents and the United States Supreme Court in Barefoot v. Estelle, in which he was referred to as "the leading thinker on the issue" of violence risk assessment.