Hamman v. County of Maricopa

How courts have described this case

Verbatim parenthetical descriptions written by other courts when citing this decision. Ranked by citation-network relevance.

• holding that a psychiatrist has a duty to protect foreseeable victims from a patient’s violent behavior
• holding that when a psychiatrist determines or should reasonably have determined that a patient poses a danger to third persons, “the psychiatrist has a duty to exercise reasonable care to protect the foreseeable victim of that danger” (first emphasis added)
• imposing a duty to any foreseeable victim who is “within the zone of danger, that is, subject to probable risk of the patient’s violent conduct”
• finding a special circumstance in that the potential victims were more than random members of the community
• describing Tarasoff as imposing a duty on the psychologist to protect the patient’s “intended victim”
• characterizing the Tarasoff quote as commenting on the “scope of a psychiatrist’s duty”

Source: CourtListener parenthetical corpus (CC0).