When does a university become responsible for a risk it didn’t create?
A decision handed down by the Supreme Court of the State of Washington, in the Pacific Northwest, raises a question with surprising relevance to the continuing “duty of care debate” about university responsibility in Britain.
Before asking what duty of care a higher education provider might owe its students, we should first address a more fundamental premise – what, in law, is the relationship between them?
On 30 July 2026, the Supreme Court ruled in Martinez & Houtz v Washington State University that the university (WSU) owed a legal duty arising from its real-world operational relationship with a recognised student fraternity.
For British readers unfamiliar with the American system, fraternities are private student membership organisations associated with universities, often with their own houses and elaborate social traditions.
The case concerned the death of 19-year-old Sam Martinez from acute alcohol poisoning in November 2019. Martinez was a new member of the Alpha Tau Omega fraternity – referred to in the proceedings as Gamma Chi – and he died following a fraternity initiation event involving “hazing”, the practices imposed on new members which can include humiliation, coercion, and dangerous drinking.
The subsequent wrongful death claim brought by Martinez’s parents alleged that WSU’s negligence contributed to their son’s death. The trial court initially ruled that WSU owed Martinez no duty of care and dismissed the claim on that basis, but the Washington Court of Appeals reversed that decision, finding that a duty did exist, and WSU appealed to the state’s Supreme Court.
The ruling handed down on 30 July confirmed the existence of that duty. A contemporary news video includes Martinez’s mother explaining why the family pursued their case.
The important legal point is that WSU did not itself create the immediate danger. The fraternity did. Nor did the Supreme Court need to establish a general special relationship between WSU and its individual students in order to find that a duty was owed to Sam.
Exceptions to the rules
Washington tort law generally imposes no duty upon one party to protect another from the conduct of a third party, but there are exceptions. A duty may arise where there is a sufficiently definite relationship with the third party whose conduct presents the risk, together with an ability to control that conduct. The Supreme Court had considered this principle in Barlow v State in 2024, but concluded that, in that case, WSU did not have sufficient control over the conduct of the individual student who sexually assaulted Barlow at an off-campus party for such a duty to arise. The critical issue was therefore not simply where the incident occurred, but the degree of control arising from the relationship.
Martinez was different. Here, the relationship capable of providing the necessary control was between WSU and Gamma Chi, an organisation which was formally recognised by the university. WSU imposed requirements upon recognised fraternities, prohibited hazing, investigated violations, and had powers to impose sanctions, including withdrawal of university recognition.
The Supreme Court concluded that WSU’s relationship with Gamma Chi was a “special relationship” capable of giving rise to a duty to protect foreseeable victims from foreseeable harm – and in Sam’s case, that meant a duty owed by WSU to protect him from foreseeable harm caused by the fraternity.
WSU had argued that it bore no legal responsibility because the fraternity members were adults and the events took place off campus. The Supreme Court’s analysis, however, focused on WSU’s relationship with Gamma Chi – the authority and control the university exercised over the recognised fraternity and the responsibilities arising from that relationship.
The duty has now been established. Whether WSU breached it and whether any breach caused Martinez’s death are separate questions to be determined at a later stage of the proceedings, but for the wider debate about university responsibility, it’s the finding that a duty existed which matters.
Start with the relationship
American law can’t, of course, determine English law. But Martinez is noteworthy because of the route by which the court reached the question of duty – it started by examining the relationship capable of generating legal responsibility. In Martinez, that was the university’s relationship with a recognised fraternity. Other American courts have examined a different relationship, the one directly between a university and its students.
In 2018, the California Supreme Court considered the university-student relationship directly in Regents of the University of California v Rosen, a case that was explored in an earlier article about the distinction between providing mental health care and protecting students from foreseeable danger. The case concerned Katherine Rosen, a student who was seriously injured when she was attacked by another student during a chemistry laboratory session, and a contemporary news video reported on the case and the court’s ruling.
The university argued that it owed Rosen no duty to protect her from the criminal conduct of another student. The court disagreed, concluding that post-secondary institutions and their students could have a “special relationship” giving rise to a limited duty to protect against foreseeable violence during curricular activities and activities closely related to the provision of education.
What makes Rosen interesting to a British audience is the court’s attempt to describe what a modern university actually is. “The college environment is unlike any other”, it observed. Universities provide courses in exchange for fees, but are far more than businesses. Residential universities provide accommodation, but are more than landlords. They provide social, sporting, and cultural opportunities and create communities in which students may spend a substantial proportion of their lives.
Universities also exercise powers. They impose rules, regulate classrooms and campuses, employ staff concerned with student welfare and security, and monitor and discipline student behaviour. The court quoted an earlier judgment describing a modern university as providing an environment in which every aspect of student life is, to some degree, “university guided”.
The court was equally clear about the limits of this relationship. Universities are not parents exercising in loco parentis responsibility over adult students, nor are they insurers of student safety, and much of a student’s private and off-campus life properly remains beyond institutional control. The relationship does not apply equally to every aspect of student life, and neither do the responsibilities arising from it. It’s this attempt to identify both the existence and extent of the relationship that makes Rosen relevant to the British debate.
The English gap
The nature of the university-student relationship remains surprisingly difficult to define in England and Wales. British universities aren’t schools exercising parental responsibility over children, nor are they healthcare providers, diagnosing and treating their students as patients. That is the role of the NHS. Where universities provide accommodation, they may of course have additional responsibilities as landlords, but that doesn’t define the wider university-student relationship. Nor does framing students as consumers purchasing educational services adequately capture what higher education institutions actually do.
Universities occupy a distinct operational space – they teach and assess students, determine academic progression, award degrees, and decide on reasonable adjustments. At the same time, they establish behavioural standards, exercise disciplinary authority, operate complaints procedures, manage accommodation, and maintain formal systems intended to protect student safety and wellbeing.
This creates a complex and distinctive relationship, yet English law has never satisfactorily defined its overall legal character. That omission is significant because the underlying nature of a relationship can determine whether legal duties arise from it and, if so, their nature, content, and extent. Any resulting duty may be narrow or broad depending on the particular circumstances, but understanding the legal character of the underlying relationship is logically the necessary first step.
Closer to home
A relevant comparison can be found in Feder & McCamish v Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama. The 2023 case concerned two students who reported sexual assaults by the same fellow student. Once again, the college had not itself created the original danger – the alleged assaults were the actions of another student.
Once the assaults were reported, the focus shifted to the college’s own actions. It had policies and procedures, investigatory and disciplinary powers, and responsibilities towards the students involved. The college argued that it owed no relevant common-law duty of care, but the court disagreed and found that duties arose in the circumstances, going on to find numerous breaches concerning the college’s own handling of protection, investigation, discipline, support, and communication.
The opening question posed by Recorder Halford was remarkably simple.
“What legal consequences follow when students report to their higher education institution that they have been harmed by another student?”
That question now looks pertinent on both sides of the Atlantic. Feder & McCamish, Rosen, and Martinez are very different cases, decided under different legal systems and through different legal doctrines, and shouldn’t be treated as equivalents. But taken together, they raise a more fundamental question about the relationships surrounding university life and the circumstances in which those relationships can generate legal responsibility.
The wrong question
The British debate about university duty of care has often been framed as a binary choice – do universities owe their students a duty of care, or don’t they? Framing the issue this way may miss that more fundamental question of what the nature of the relationship is from which legal responsibility might arise. A duty of care doesn’t need to encompass every aspect of student life, nor does recognising a duty turn an institution into an insurer of student safety. Relationships differ, and the legal duties arising from them will differ too.
Rosen, Martinez, and Feder & McCamish illustrate the point in different ways. In Rosen, the relevant relationship was directly between university and student. In Martinez, it was between university and a recognised fraternity, from which a duty to protect a student arose. And in Feder & McCamish, responsibility arose in the circumstances of the college’s response to reported assaults. What matters is the authority an institution possesses, the degree of control it exercises, the responsibilities it assumes, the risks it knows about, and the circumstances in which others may reasonably rely upon it.
Those factors don’t automatically produce a duty of care, still less determine how broad any resulting duty should be. But they help to identify when a relationship is capable of generating legal responsibility in the first place.
That is what makes the new Martinez judgment instructive from this side of the pond. Nobody is suggesting that American law should be imported into Britain. But another common-law jurisdiction is actively clarifying the relationships, institutional powers, and circumstances from which legal responsibilities may arise, and the implications of this ruling extend beyond the immediate facts of the case, raising questions about universities’ relationships with SUs, clubs, societies, and other organisations they recognise, regulate, or oversee. Meanwhile, the British debate remains largely preoccupied with resisting the recognition of additional legal duties owed by universities to their students.
Before we argue about how broad or narrow a university’s legal obligations should be, we should first confront the underlying legal premise – what, in law, is the relationship between a university and its students? Parliament has so far opted to leave the development of additional legal duties to the courts, but judges can only determine the individual cases brought before them on their particular facts and merits. If we want a straightforward answer to the underlying question, we may ultimately have to look to Parliament to provide it.
