Law Commons^™

Critique Of Pure Risk Assessment Or, Kant Meets Tarasoff, Douglas Mossman Md

Faculty Articles and Other Publications

This Article takes a "critical" approach to the assumptions underlying current practices of violence risk assessment. The Article first explicates a fundamental difference between how mental health researchers now interpret the phrase "violence prediction" and how they understood that phrase in the 1970s. Applying a "critical" approach, the Article then shows that courts and mental health professionals may need to abandon the hope that more accurate methods of predicting violence will help clinicians make better decisions about potential violence. Although this result may seem disappointing, it can liberate mental health professionals from regarding patients as statistical sources of risk and …