Executive Privilege: The Sovereign Exception in Action

Executive Privilege: A Constitutional Myth

The dangerous patient exception to the psychotherapist-patient privilege: the Tarasoff duty and the Jaffee footnote.

With the U.S. Supreme Court's 1996 decision in Jaffee v. Redmond, all U.S. jurisdictions have now adopted some form of evidentiary privilege for confidential statements by patients to psychotherapists for the purpose of seeking treatment. The majority of states, following the decision of the Supreme Court of California in Tarasoff v. Regents of the University of California, have also adopted so...

Privilege in the Federal Courts: should there be a "dangerous patient exception"?

Although a 1996 U.S. Supreme Court decision affirmed that therapists cannot be compelled to testify in federal proceedings about patients' disclosures, a footnote could be interpreted as creating a "dangerous patient exception" when there is a serious threat of harm. This column describes circuit courts' differing views about whether such an exception exists and the value of an exception. Altho...

RNAa in action: From the exception to the norm

Small RNA programmed Argonautes are sophisticated cellular effector platforms known to be involved in a diverse array of functions ranging from mRNA cleavage, translational inhibition, DNA elimination, epigenetic silencing, alternative splicing and even gene activation. First observed in human cells, small RNA-induced gene activation, also known as RNAa, involves the targeted recruitment of Arg...

Constitutional law--right of privacy--evidence law of privileges--the patient-litigant exception to the psychotherapist-patient privilege.