Some of the most valuable personal injury claims involve a defendant who did not directly cause the harm. A youth sports organization whose coach abused athletes, a property owner whose tenant was assaulted, a school whose student was attacked: in each, the plaintiff must establish that the institutional defendant owed a duty to protect against someone else's conduct. In Brown v. USA Taekwondo, 11 Cal.5th 204 (2021), the California Supreme Court settled the analytical framework for that question. Five years on, it remains the opinion every demurrer and every opposition in a third-party-harm case starts from.
The facts
Three former youth taekwondo athletes alleged they were sexually abused by their coach, who was affiliated with USA Taekwondo, the sport's national governing body. They sued USA Taekwondo and the United States Olympic Committee, which oversees the national governing bodies, alleging both organizations negligently failed to protect them. The trial court sustained demurrers without leave to amend. The Court of Appeal reversed as to USA Taekwondo, finding it had a special relationship with the coach that supported a duty, but affirmed as to the Olympic Committee.
The holding
The Supreme Court, in a unanimous opinion by Justice Kruger, affirmed. More importantly, it clarified the method. The court held that determining whether a defendant owes a duty to protect a plaintiff from third-party conduct involves two steps:
- Step one. Determine whether there is a special relationship between the defendant and either the plaintiff or the third party, or some other recognized basis, that gives rise to an affirmative duty to protect. Without such a relationship, there is generally no duty to protect against harm caused by others, consistent with the longstanding no-duty-to-rescue principle.
- Step two. If a duty arises at step one, consult the factors from Rowland v. Christian to decide whether policy considerations justify limiting or eliminating that duty in the category of cases at issue.
The court was explicit that the Rowland factors do not create duty where none exists. They serve as a check on duty that otherwise arises from a special relationship. Lower courts had sometimes applied Rowland at the threshold, or blended the two inquiries into a single balancing test. Brown separated them.
Applying the test
On the facts pleaded, USA Taekwondo had a special relationship with the coach because it had the ability to control his conduct, including the authority to set and enforce safety policies and to sanction or bar coaches. That relationship gave rise to a duty to protect athletes. The Olympic Committee's relationship was more remote; it oversaw the national governing body but lacked comparable direct control over individual coaches, so no duty arose at step one. Because no special relationship existed with the Olympic Committee, the court did not need to reach the Rowland analysis for that defendant.
Why it matters for case-building
Brown reorganized how practitioners should plead and prove duty in third-party-harm cases. A few practical consequences stand out.
Lead with the relationship, not foreseeability
Before Brown, complaints often emphasized foreseeability: prior incidents, warning signs, and the obviousness of the risk. Those facts still matter, but they belong primarily in the breach and causation analysis and at step two. At step one, the pleading must identify the relationship. The recognized categories include the defendant's relationship with the victim, such as common carrier and passenger, innkeeper and guest, school and student, or employer and employee in some contexts, and the defendant's relationship with the actor, such as the ability to control a dangerous person. Plead the facts showing control or dependency first.
Control is the core concept
For relationships with the third-party actor, Brown made the defendant's ability to control that person the central inquiry. Discovery should target the mechanisms of control: codes of conduct, credentialing and background-check requirements, discipline and suspension powers, reporting structures, and actual instances where the organization exercised that authority over others. An organization that disciplined other coaches for similar conduct will struggle to argue it lacked control over the one at issue.
Rowland is categorical, not case-specific
At step two, the Rowland analysis is performed at the level of the category of cases, not the specific facts of the plaintiff's injury. Defendants frequently try to argue the particular harm was unforeseeable on these facts. That argument goes to breach, which is a jury question, not to the existence of duty. Plaintiffs opposing demurrers should frame the category broadly, for instance youth sports organizations protecting minor athletes from abuse by credentialed coaches, and show that the Rowland factors do not support carving it out.
Where Brown has traveled
Because Brown addressed duty generally, its framework applies well beyond sports organizations. It informs claims against schools and universities, building in part on the court's earlier recognition in Regents of University of California v. Superior Court (2018) that colleges have a special relationship with enrolled students in curricular activities. It applies to landlord and premises cases involving criminal acts, to employer liability for workplace violence, and to claims against religious and youth-serving organizations. In each, the question is the same: what relationship gives rise to the duty, and does any categorical policy reason limit it.
For practitioners handling premises claims involving third-party criminal conduct, our premises liability coverage addresses foreseeability proof in that context. Additional appellate breakdowns are collected under case law and settlements.
Pleading checklist after Brown
- Identify the specific special relationship, with the defendant's relationship to the plaintiff, the actor, or both, and plead the supporting facts.
- Plead control mechanisms concretely: policies, enforcement authority, credentialing, and past exercises of discipline.
- Separate duty allegations from breach allegations so the court can apply each step cleanly.
- Anticipate a step-two Rowland argument and frame the category of cases in terms that make a policy exception hard to justify.
- Where multiple institutional defendants are layered, as in Brown, analyze each relationship separately. A national governing body and its umbrella organization may stand in very different positions.
The bottom line
Brown did not expand or contract duty so much as discipline the inquiry. For plaintiffs, that discipline is useful. A well-pleaded special relationship, backed by evidence of control, survives the threshold challenge, and the remaining fight over foreseeability and breach belongs to the jury. Cases that lose under Brown are typically cases that never identified a relationship in the first place.
