“Finding that the confidentiality of psychotherapy serves important public as well as private interests, the Supreme Court ruled, on June 13, 1996, that Federal courts must allow psychotherapists and...

“Finding that the confidentiality of psychotherapy serves important public as well as private interests, the Supreme Court ruled, on June 13, 1996, that Federal courts must allow psychotherapists and other mental health professionals to refuse to disclose patient records in judicial proceedings. By a vote of 7 to 2, the Court created a new evidentiary privilege, in both civil and criminal cases, similar to the lawyer-client and marital privileges the Federal courts have recognized for years. The case grew out of an effort by a licensed clinical social worker and her patient, a police officer who received counseling after killing a man in the line of duty, to protect records of the therapy sessions from being disclosed in a Federal civil rights suit brought against the officer by the man’s family. ‘This case amply demonstrates the importance of allowing individuals to receive confidential counseling,’ Justice Stevens said. ‘If the privilege were rejected, confidential conversations between psychotherapists and their patients would surely be chilled.’ The new privilege applies generally and is not limited to police officers. Justice Stevens said the privilege would apply to clinical social workers as well as to psychiatrists and psychologists because the reasons for having the privilege ‘apply with equal force’ to all the professions. Judge Antonin Scalia dissented from what he called ‘a privilege that is new, vast, and ill defined.’ He suggested that people would be better advised to seek advice from their mothers than from psychiatrists, ‘yet there is not mother-child privilege.’ He said the privilege would interfere with the truth-finding function of the courts and cause the courts ‘to become themselves the instruments of wrong’ ” (Greenhouse, 1996, p. A1). Draft a comment in response to Judge Scalia’s dissent.