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Judicial Decision Making And The Duty To Warn: An Empirical Study Of Case Law, Casey Dunn Ravitz

Theses and Dissertations

Duty to warn is an important staple of psychologists’ ethics training. It is also a widely misunderstood and problematic law that does not necessarily capture the intricacies of working with high-risk or potentially violent clients in outpatient settings. While inpatient settings allow for some control over one’s clients, outpatient settings increase the difficulty in performing risk assessments in duty to warn situations, as well as with managing clients who are not within one’s custody. While researchers have long identified issues related to psychologists’ understanding of the duty to warn, none have empirically explored whether the trends seen in individual cases …