SUSAN A. BANDES

Susan A. Bandes is a scholar in the areas of criminal procedure, federal courts, and civil rights, and a pioneer in the interdisciplinary study of the role of emotion in law. She is a 1976 graduate of the University of Michigan Law School. Her legal career began at the Illinois Office of the State Appellate Defender. In 1980, she became staff counsel for the Illinois branch of the American Civil Liberties Union, where she litigated a broad spectrum of civil rights cases and helped draft and secure passage of the Illinois Freedom of Information Act. She joined the faculty of DePaul University College of Law in 1984, was named the Centennial Professor of Law in 2012, and the Centennial Professor of Law Emeritus in 2017. She has been a Fulbright Scholar at Uppsala University, Sweden, a distinguished visiting scholar at the University of New South Wales, Australia, and a visiting professor at the Berkeley, Brooklyn, University of Chicago, University of Miami, Northwestern, NYU, and Florida State law schools.

Bandes has written more than 70 articles, which appear in the Yale, Stanford, University of Chicago, Michigan and Southern California law reviews, as well as interdisciplinary journals like Law and Social Inquiry, the Annual Review of Law and Social Science, and the Law and Society Review. Her book The Passions of Law was published by NYU Press in 2000. Her co-edited volume, the Edward Elgar Research Handbook on Law and Emotion, appeared in 2020. She is an official collaborator on a research program investigating how emotion affects intergroup dynamics at the Social Psychology and Law Lab, Arizona State University, and an affiliated researcher on the project JUSTEMOTIONS: The Construction of Objectivity, an international perspective on the emotive and cognitive process of judicial decision-making.

She is a member of the American Law Institute, a fellow of the American Bar Foundation, and a founder of the Law and Society Association’s Collaborative Research Network on Law and Emotion.

The Sense of an Ending
73 DePaul Law Review 751 (2024)

What are victim impact statements for?
87 Brooklyn Law Review 1253 (2022)

Empathy and Remote Legal Proceedings
51 Southwestern L. Rev. 20 (2021)

Feeling and Thinking Like a Lawyer: Cognition, Emotion, and the Practice and Progress of Law
89 Fordham L. Rev.2427 (2021)

Virtual Trials: Necessity, Invention, and the Evolution of the Courtroom
68 Buffalo L. Rev. 1275 (2020) (with Neal Feigenson)
(cited extensively in Vasquez Diaz v. Commonwealth of Massachusetts, Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court, May 5, 2021)

The Mismeasure of Terry Stops: Assessing the Psychological and Emotional Harms of Stop and Frisk to Individuals and Communities
37 Behavioral Sciences & the Law Issue 2 (2019) (with Philip A. Goff, Erin Kerrison and Marie Pryor)

Compassion and the Rule of Law
13 International Journal of Law in Context 184 (2017) (This article was the subject of an appreciation in JOTWELL: The Journal of Things We Like (Lots). See Mark Kende, A Compassion for the Law, February 2017)