Near the conflagration: the wide duty to warn

The "duty to warn" has become fixed in US law since the 1976 case of Tarasoff v Regents of the University of California. In that case, the California Supreme Court decided that psychotherapists whose patients make a specific, serious threat of violence against a specific, clearly identifiable potential victim have a duty to warn the intended victim, directly or indirectly, of the threat. Tarasoff inspired several successful and unsuccessful lawsuits. A recent Vermont case has extended the duty to warn in that state to a threat of damage to property when persons may be physically harmed. The duty to warn is explicitly based on considerations of social utility and, as such, is attractive for courts to expand because an apparently minimal effort by therapists will often prevent substantial harm to victims. Some states have codified the duty to warn in a statute, but other states have refused to adopt the Tarasoff reasoning. In the absence of clear legal decisions to the contrary, psychotherapists may well anticipate that the duty to warn operates in their states.