John Monahan

John T. Monahan is an American psychologist who joined the faculty of the University of Virginia School of Law in 1980, where he held the John S. Shannon Distinguished Professorship of Law and spent more than four decades studying the prediction of violent behavior within the mental health and criminal justice systems before retiring after 46 years on the faculty. In 2001 he was a lead author of Rethinking Risk Assessment, the product of a large MacArthur Foundation funded project that produced a structured method for assessing violence risk shown to outperform unaided clinical judgment. His research on risk prediction has been cited by name in major court decisions, including the California Supreme Court's Tarasoff v. Regents and the United States Supreme Court's Barefoot v. Estelle, where he was described as the leading thinker on the assessment of violence risk. Monahan authored or edited seventeen books and more than 250 articles and chapters over his career.