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A tort is a wrongful injury to a person or his or her property. The person inflicting the harm is called the
M
 M. Tort law considers the rights and remedies available to persons injured through other people's
carelessness or intentional misconduct. Tort law also holds person in certain circumstances responsible for
other people' injuries regardless of blame. Torts are commonly subdivided into three broad categories:
Ô intentional tort
Ô negligence
Ô strict, or absolute, liability i



 


3 
 

An injury inflicted by positive, willful, and aggressive conduct, or by design, as opposed to an injury caused by
negligence or resulting from an accident.
Intentional torts are actions designed to injure another person or that person's property. The tort-feasor intends a
particular harm to result from the misconduct. There are many specific types of intentional torts, including:

Ô battery,
Ô assault,
Ô false imprisonment,
Ô infliction of emotional distress,
Ô fraud,
Ô misrepresentation,
Ô malicious prosecution,
Ô abuse of process,
Ô defamation,
Ô trespass,
Ô conversion,
Ô slander of title
Ô disparagement of goods,
Ô efamation by computer.ii

  ½ 
The failure to do something that a reasonable person would do in the same circumstances or the doing of
something a reasonable person would not do. Negligence is a wrong generally characterized by carelessness,
inattentiveness, and neglectfulness rather than by a positive intent to cause injury.
Negligence is a failure to exercise reasonable care to avoid injuring others. It is distinguishable from intentional
torts in that negligence doesn't require the intent to commit a wrongful action; instead, the wrongful action itself
is sufficient to constitute negligence.

What makes misconduct negligence is that:

a) the behavior was not reasonably careful, and
b) Someone was injured as a result of this unreasonable carelessness.iii

Π 
  
£iability for an injury whether or not there is fault or negligence; absolute liability.
Strict £iability, (or Absolute £iability), is the tort-feasor's responsibility for injuring another regardless of
intent, negligence, or fault. The most important type of strict liability is product liability, a legal theory under
which the manufacturer or other seller of unreasonably dangerous or defective product is held liable for injuries
the product causes. Individuals in possession of wild and dangerous animals are also subject to absolute liability
for injuries caused by those animals.

Other activities found to be so dangerous that the impose absolute liability are the use of chemical sprays, the
storage of a large amount of natural gas in a populated area, the storage of explosives, and the conducting of
blasting operations which result in damage to adjoining property.

Absolute liability is different from intentional tort in that intent to commit an absolute liability tort is irrelevant.
£ikewise, strict liability is distinguishable from negligence, because the tort-feasor is responsible under
absolute liability regardless how careful he or she might have been.iv

Public Policy Objectives in Tort £aw

£ike every aspect of our legal system, they are several purposes underlying tort principles. c   
1. Protecting persons and property from unjust injury by providing legally enforceable rights.
2. Compensating victims by holding accountable the persons responsible for causing such harm.
3. Encouraging minimum standards of social conduct among society's members.
4. eterring violation of those standards of social conduct.
5. Allocating losses among different participants in the social arena.

Protecting Persons and Property:

V 
Modern tort law strives to prevent unjustified harm to innocent victims. Tort law enables private citizens
 to use the legal system to resolve disputes in which one party claims that the other has acted improperly,
resulting in harm. The system compels the tort-feasor to compensate the injured party for his or her
losses. This accountability is crucial to our legal sense of fair play and equity. People should be held
responsible for their actions, especially when they wreak havoc on others. Redress should be available
for innocent victims of carelessness, recklessness, or intentional injury.

Minimum Standards of Social Conduct:



 
To function meaningfully in American society citizens must understand society's norms and values. One
extremely important norm encourages the public to behave so as to avoid hurting others or their
belongings. Tort law is largely composed of minimum standards of conduct; persons functioning below
such thresholds are defined as tort-feasors, whereas individuals acting at/or above such criteria are
acceptable to the community. However, the intention is not to ensure conformity; rather, the idea is to
inspire people to respect the dignity and integrity each individual possesses.

Tort law is not designed to infringe heedlessly upon another's activities. Tort law discourages abuses by
establishing a clear system of legal rights and remedies enforceable in court proceedings. We all know
that we can go to court when someone strikes us, invades our privacy, creates a nuisance, or acts
negligently toward us. £ikewise, we know that we might be hauled into court if we do those things to
others. By establishing minimum standards of conduct, tort law sets the rules for living - Mthe rules of
thumbM - by which we try to get along with other people.

Allocating £osses
It is easy to grasp the idea that an individual tortfeasor should compensate the victim for the tortfeasor's
wrongdoing. However, in modern society there are often many different participants in virtually any
activity, and it is less clear who should be labeled as tortfeasor or victim. For example, at the time of the
American Revolution, most Americans were fairly self-sufficient and dealt directly with individuals for
goods or services. If a colonist bought a broken plow or a poorly shod horse from the local blacksmith,
he or she knew whom to take to task.

However, as the United States became more industrialized, commercial transactions ceased to be
one-on-one transactions. Today, people buy canned produce from a local grocery that bought it from a
manufacturer that bought it from a grower. If the produce is spoiled, perhaps the purchaser's spouse or
child, rather than the purchaser, will suffer the injury. The culpability lines become less clear as the
producer of the defective item becomes more removed from the ultimate user. Tort law has evolved the
legal theory of products liability to determine who is in the best position to bear the costs of defective
products - the innocent user or the sellers and manufacturers.
 It is an economic decision that courts and legislatures have made in stating that industry can best afford
the costs of injuries caused by dangerously made goods. In other words, the burden of shouldering the
economic loss is placed upon commercial businesses instead of the individual who suffers the harm.This
illustrates how tort law can be used to assign the expenses associated with misfortune even when fault is
hazy. More commonly, though, a single tort-feasor can be identified and saddled with the financial
obligation.

Tarasoff v. Regents of the University of California, 17 Cal. 3d 425, 551 P.2d 334, 131 Cal. Rptr. 14 (Cal.
1976), was a case in which the Supreme Court of California held that mental health professionals have a duty to
protect individuals who are being threatened with bodily harm by a patient. The original 1974 decision
mandated warning the threatened individual, but a 1976 rehearing of the case by the California Supreme Court
called for a Mduty to protectM the intended victim. The professional may discharge the duty in several ways,
including notifying police, warning the intended victim, and/or taking other reasonable steps to protect the
threatened individual.

Prosenjit Poddar
Tatiana Tarasoff 
·


è
 è
was a student from Bengal, India. He came to the UC Berkeley as a graduate student in
September 1967 and resided at International House. In the fall of 1968 he attended folk dancing classes at the
International House, and it was there he met c c
. They saw each other weekly throughout the fall,
and on New Year's Eve she kissed è
. He interpreted the act to be recognition of the existence of a serious
relationship. This view was not shared by c
 who, upon learning of his feelings, told him that she was
involved with other men and otherwise indicated that she was not interested in entering into an intimate
relationship with him. This gave rise to feelings of resentment in è
. He began to stalk her and apparently
developed a wish for revenge.

As a result of this rebuff è

underwent a severe emotional crisis. He became depressed and neglected his
appearance, his studies and his health. He remained by himself, speaking disjointedly and often weeping. This
condition persisted, with steady deterioration, throughout the spring and into the summer of 1969. The
defendant had occasional meetings with c
 during this period and tape recorded their various
conversations in an attempt to ascertain why she did not love him.

uring the summer of 1969 c

 went to South America. After her departure è
began to improve and
at the suggestion of a friend sought psychological assistance. è
 è
was a patient of 

 

, a psychologist at UC Berkeley's  
  in 1969. è
confided his intent to kill
c
. 

 requested that the campus police detain è
, writing that, in his opinion, è
was
suffering from paranoid schizophrenia, acute and severe. c    recommended that the  be
civilly committed as a dangerous person. è
was detained, but shortly thereafter released, as he appeared
rational. 

 supervisor, 

 è, then ordered that è
not be subject to further
detention.

In October, after c
 had returned, è
stopped seeing his psychologist. Neither c
 nor her
parents received any warning of the threat. è
then befriended c
 brother, even moving in with
him. Several months later, on October 27, 1969, è
carried out the plan he had confided to his
psychologist, stabbing and killing c
. c
 parents then sued 
 and various other employees of
the University.

In a criminal case, è v. è

, è
was convicted of second-degree murder, but the conviction was
later appealed and overturned on the grounds that the jury was inadequately informed. A second trial was not
held, and è
was released on the condition that he returns to India.

Ñ    


The 
 
 
 found that a mental health professional has a duty not only to a patient, but also
to individuals who are specifically being threatened by a patient. This decision has since been adopted by most
states in the U.S. and is widely influential in jurisdictions outside the U.S. as well.

Justice Mathew O. Tobriner wrote the famous holding in the majority opinion. MThe public policy favoring
protection of the confidential character of patient-psychotherapist communications must yield to the extent to
which disclosure is essential to avert danger to others. The protective privilege ends where the public peril
begins.M

Justice Mosk wrote a partial dissent, arguing two things: (1) that the rule in future cases should be one of the
actual subjective prediction of violence on the part of the psychiatrist, which occurred in this case, not one
based on objective professional standards, because predictions are inherently unreliable; and (2) the
psychiatrists notified the police, who were presumably in a better position to protect Tatiana than she would be
to protect herself.

Justice Clark dissented, quoting a law review article that stated, MThe very practice of psychiatry depends upon
the reputation in the community that the psychiatrist will not tell.M
u




è      ½ 

!  Robert Bierenbaum was a landmark murder case, setting precedent on
upholding Physician-patient privilege even when a c
 warning is invoked: MNeither a psychiatrist issuing
a c
 warning nor a patient telling his friends he's in treatment constitutes a waiver of a patient's
psychiatrist-patient privilege.M