Tarasoff v. Regents of the University of California

Prosenjit Poddar, a graduate student at UC Berkeley, confided to his psychologist, Dr. Lawrence Moore, at the university counseling center that he intended to kill Tatiana Tarasoff, a fellow student who had rejected his romantic advances. Dr. Moore notified campus police, who briefly detained Poddar but released him when he appeared rational. No warning was given to Tarasoff or her family. Two months later, Poddar killed Tarasoff.

The court reasoned that the special relationship between a therapist and patient creates a duty of care extending to identifiable third parties threatened by the patient. Drawing on the general principle that one who is in a special relationship with a dangerous person may owe a duty to third parties, the court held that therapists must balance patient confidentiality against public safety. The court rejected the argument that imposing such a duty would deter patients from seeking treatment, finding that the risk of violence to identifiable victims outweighed the potential impact on the therapeutic relationship. The court emphasized that the public policy favoring protection of life outweighs the policy favoring confidentiality in communications.

Tarasoff is one of the most influential tort cases of the twentieth century. Nearly every state has adopted some form of the Tarasoff duty, either through judicial decisions or legislation, though the scope of the duty varies significantly by jurisdiction. The case fundamentally changed the practice of psychotherapy and created an ongoing tension between patient confidentiality and the duty to protect. It has been extended in some jurisdictions to other professionals and relationships where one party has knowledge of a foreseeable risk to identifiable third parties.