PERSONAL INJURY | 2026-10-25

When Does Someone Have a Legal Duty to Protect You From a Third Party? California’s Special-Relationship Rule After Brown v. USA Taekwondo

The general rule is that no one has a duty to protect you from the criminal or harmful acts of a third person. California recognizes an important exception: when a special relationship exists, an affirmative duty to protect can arise. In Brown v. USA Taekwondo, the California Supreme Court set out the two-step framework courts now use to decide when that duty exists.

California law begins with a stark default rule: a person generally has no duty to protect another from the harmful conduct of a third party . If a stranger is assaulted, the bystander who did nothing is usually not liable. But the law recognizes a crucial exception. When a special relationship exis

Few questions in California tort law are as consequential — or as misunderstood — as when one party must protect another from the acts of a third person. The answer determines whether a youth sports organization is liable for an abusive coach, whether a university must protect a student from a foreseeably violent classmate, and whether a business must guard its patrons against criminal attacks. The California Supreme Court's decision in Brown v. USA Taekwondo gave courts a clear, structured way to answer that question. This article explains the default no-duty rule, the special-relationship exception, and the two-step framework Brown established.

The Default Rule: No Duty to Protect

California tort law distinguishes sharply between misfeasance (making things worse through one's own conduct) and nonfeasance (failing to act to protect someone). As a general matter, a person has no affirmative duty to protect another from harm caused by a third party or by the person's own conduct. The classic formulation is that one is ordinarily under no duty to come to the aid of another, even when doing so would be easy. This default reflects a longstanding reluctance in the common law to impose liability for mere inaction. The practical consequence is that a plaintiff who was harmed by a third party's conduct cannot recover from a defendant who simply failed to intervene — unless the plaintiff can establish that the defendant fell within a recognized exception.

The Special-Relationship Exception

The most important exception to the no-duty rule arises when the defendant stands in a special relationship with either the plaintiff or the third party who caused the harm. A special relationship with the victim — such as between a common carrier and its passengers, an innkeeper and guests, a school and its students, or a business and its invitees — can give rise to a duty to protect the victim from foreseeable harm. A special relationship with the dangerous person — such as between a therapist and patient, or a custodian and a person in custody — can give rise to a duty to control that person's conduct. These relationships share a common thread: the defendant has some measure of control, has undertaken a protective role, or has placed the plaintiff in a position of dependence or vulnerability that justifies imposing an affirmative obligation.

What Brown v. USA Taekwondo Decided

In Brown v. USA Taekwondo (2021) 11 Cal.5th 204, young athletes alleged they had been sexually abused by their taekwondo coach, and they sued both USA Taekwondo (the national governing body for the sport) and the United States Olympic Committee. The question was whether either organization owed the athletes a duty to protect them from the coach's abuse. The California Supreme Court held that USA Taekwondo, which had a relationship with and authority over its member coaches, could owe such a duty, but that the United States Olympic Committee, which lacked a comparable relationship with the coach, did not. In reaching that result, the Court clarified and unified the analysis courts should use, adopting a two-step framework that has since governed failure-to-protect cases across California.

Step One: Is There a Special Relationship Giving Rise to a Duty?

Under the first step of the Brown framework, the court asks whether the defendant had a special relationship with the plaintiff or with the person who caused the harm — a relationship that gives rise to an affirmative duty to protect. This is a threshold inquiry: without a special relationship (or another recognized basis for an affirmative duty), the default no-duty rule applies and the analysis ends. The court examines the nature of the relationship, the degree of control or supervisory authority the defendant had, the extent to which the defendant had undertaken to provide protection, and the vulnerability and dependence of the plaintiff. In Brown, USA Taekwondo's authority to set rules for and discipline its member coaches supported a special relationship; the USOC's attenuated connection to the coach did not.

Step Two: Do the Rowland Factors Limit the Duty?

Only if a special relationship exists does the court proceed to the second step, which applies the policy factors from Rowland v. Christian (1968) 69 Cal.2d 108. These factors ask whether considerations of public policy nonetheless limit or negate the duty that the relationship would otherwise impose. The Rowland factors include the foreseeability of harm, the degree of certainty that the plaintiff suffered injury, the closeness of the connection between the defendant's conduct and the injury, the moral blame attached to the defendant's conduct, the policy of preventing future harm, the burden on the defendant and the consequences to the community of imposing a duty, and the availability and cost of insurance. The key innovation of Brown was to clarify the sequence: the special-relationship question comes first, and the Rowland factors are applied second, only to decide whether to curtail an already-established duty — not as a free-floating test of whether any duty exists at all.

Foreseeability's Central Role

Even when a special relationship exists, the scope of the duty is bounded by foreseeability. A defendant in a special relationship generally owes a duty to protect against reasonably foreseeable harm, not against every conceivable danger. The more foreseeable the specific risk, the stronger the case for imposing a protective obligation and the greater the measures reasonably required. Conversely, where the harm was genuinely unforeseeable, the Rowland analysis at step two may limit or negate the duty. In the context of third-party criminal conduct, California courts have developed a related body of law requiring heightened foreseeability — often prior similar incidents — before imposing certain burdensome protective measures, reflecting the principle that the burden imposed should be proportional to the foreseeable risk.

Common Settings Where the Duty Arises

The special-relationship duty to protect appears across many contexts. Schools and universities have a special relationship with their students and can owe a duty to protect them from foreseeable harm, as the California Supreme Court recognized in Regents of the University of California v. Superior Court (2018) 4 Cal.5th 607, which held that colleges have a special relationship with enrolled students in the context of curricular activities. Youth-serving organizations, such as the national governing body in Brown, can owe duties to the minors in their programs. Businesses owe duties to protect invitees from foreseeable third-party crime on their premises. Therapists can owe a duty to warn or protect identifiable potential victims, as recognized in Tarasoff v. Regents of the University of California (1976) 17 Cal.3d 425. Each rests on the same structural idea: a relationship of control, undertaking, or dependence justifies an affirmative obligation.

The Williams v. State of California Baseline

The Brown framework builds on a long line of California authority, including Williams v. State of California (1983) 34 Cal.3d 18, which reaffirmed the principle that, absent a special relationship, there is no duty to protect or assist another. Williams illustrates how exacting the threshold can be: the mere fact that a public entity or its employees were present at the scene of an injury does not, without more, create a duty to protect. Something about the relationship — an undertaking, an assumption of a protective role, the creation of a reliance, or custodial control — must elevate the situation above the general no-duty baseline. Brown's two-step structure makes that threshold inquiry explicit and separates it cleanly from the policy analysis that follows.

Why the Two-Step Structure Matters for Plaintiffs

For an injured plaintiff, the practical significance of Brown is that the analysis is now structured and sequential, which disciplines how courts approach duty. A plaintiff must first identify a concrete special relationship and articulate why it gave rise to a protective duty — pointing to the defendant's control, supervisory authority, undertaking, or the plaintiff's dependence. Only then does the court weigh the Rowland factors, and it does so to decide whether policy considerations should trim the duty, not to invent reasons to deny that any duty existed. This sequencing tends to benefit plaintiffs with genuine special relationships, because it prevents a court from skipping the relationship inquiry and defaulting to a generalized policy rejection of duty. It also sharpens the defense analysis, forcing defendants to engage with the specific relationship rather than arguing in the abstract.

Building a Failure-to-Protect Case

Successfully pursuing a failure-to-protect claim requires careful development of both steps. Counsel must marshal the facts establishing the special relationship: the defendant's authority over the person who caused the harm, the protective role the defendant assumed, the rules and policies the defendant adopted, and the plaintiff's reasonable reliance or vulnerability. Counsel must then establish foreseeability — what the defendant knew or should have known about the risk, including prior complaints, warning signs, or similar incidents. Finally, counsel must be prepared to meet the Rowland analysis, showing that imposing the duty serves the policies of preventing future harm and assigning responsibility to the party best positioned to guard against the danger. Because the stakes in these cases — often involving abuse of children or serious criminal assaults — are profound, the quality of the factual and legal development is decisive.

Duty to Warn Versus Duty to Protect

Within the special-relationship framework, California distinguishes between a duty to warn and a broader duty to protect or control. In Tarasoff v. Regents of the University of California (1976) 17 Cal.3d 425, the Court recognized that a therapist with a special relationship to a patient who poses a serious danger of violence to an identifiable victim may owe a duty to take reasonable steps to protect that victim, which can include warning. The special relationship there ran to the dangerous person (the patient), giving rise to a duty to control or mitigate the risk. In other settings, the special relationship runs to the victim, and the duty is to take reasonable protective measures against foreseeable harm. The scope of what is "reasonable" varies with the relationship, the foreseeability of the danger, and the feasibility and burden of protective steps. Brown's two-step framework accommodates both strands: the first step identifies which relationship exists and what kind of duty it generates, and the second step uses the Rowland factors to calibrate the duty's reach. Counsel must be precise about which relationship is at issue, because the measures a defendant reasonably owed — a warning, increased supervision, a background check, a safety policy — depend on it.

Government and Public-Entity Defendants

When the defendant is a public entity — a school district, a public university, a municipal program — the special-relationship analysis interacts with California's governmental-immunity framework under the Government Claims Act. A public entity's liability for failing to protect generally must rest on a statutory basis, and various immunities may apply even where a special relationship would otherwise support a duty. At the same time, public schools and universities have been recognized as having special relationships with their students, so the existence of a duty and the availability of an immunity are separate questions that must both be analyzed. A plaintiff pursuing a public-entity defendant must also comply with the claim-presentation requirements of the Government Claims Act, typically filing a timely administrative claim before suit. Because these procedural and immunity rules can be outcome-determinative, failure-to-protect claims against public entities require careful, early analysis to preserve the claim and to identify the statutory footing on which liability can rest.

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Frequently Asked Questions

Does someone have a legal duty to protect me from a third party in California?

Generally no. California's default rule is that a person has no affirmative duty to protect another from the harmful acts of a third party. The main exception is when a special relationship exists between the defendant and either the victim or the person who caused the harm, which can give rise to an affirmative duty to protect.

What is the two-step framework from Brown v. USA Taekwondo?

Under Brown v. USA Taekwondo (2021) 11 Cal.5th 204, a court first asks whether a special relationship gives rise to a duty to protect; if so, it then applies the Rowland v. Christian policy factors to decide whether those considerations limit or negate the duty. The relationship inquiry comes first, the policy analysis second.

What counts as a special relationship?

Relationships involving control, an undertaking to protect, or the plaintiff's dependence — such as school-student, business-invitee, common carrier-passenger, custodian-detainee, or therapist-patient. A relationship with the dangerous person (giving a duty to control) or with the victim (giving a duty to protect) can both qualify. Call Trembach Law Firm at (213) 645-2246.

What are the Rowland factors?

From Rowland v. Christian (1968) 69 Cal.2d 108, they include foreseeability of harm, certainty of injury, the connection between the conduct and the injury, moral blame, the policy of preventing future harm, the burden on the defendant and community, and the availability of insurance. Under Brown they are used only at step two to limit an established duty.

Can a school or university be liable for failing to protect a student?

Yes, within limits. In Regents of the University of California v. Superior Court (2018) 4 Cal.5th 607, the California Supreme Court held that universities have a special relationship with enrolled students in curricular activities and can owe a duty to protect them from foreseeable harm. The duty is bounded by foreseeability and the Rowland analysis.

How does foreseeability affect the duty?

Even when a special relationship exists, the duty extends only to reasonably foreseeable harm. The more foreseeable the specific risk, the stronger the duty and the greater the protective measures reasonably required. Where harm was genuinely unforeseeable, the Rowland factors may limit or negate the duty.

Why did the USOC avoid liability in Brown but USA Taekwondo did not?

USA Taekwondo had authority over and a relationship with its member coaches — the power to set rules and discipline them — which supported a special relationship and a duty to protect the athletes. The United States Olympic Committee lacked a comparable relationship with the coach, so no special relationship arose as to it. Call Trembach Law Firm at (213) 645-2246.

What do I need to prove in a failure-to-protect case?

You must establish the special relationship (the defendant's control, undertaking, or your dependence), the foreseeability of the harm (what the defendant knew or should have known), and that imposing the duty is consistent with the Rowland policy factors. These cases turn heavily on the specific facts of the relationship and the defendant's knowledge of the risk.

Talk to a California Personal Injury Lawyer About a Failure to Protect

If you were harmed because an organization, business, school, or institution failed to protect you from a foreseeable danger, California's special-relationship rule may give you a claim. Trembach Law Firm, led by Anatolii Trembach (LL.M.; admitted in California), applies the Brown v. USA Taekwondo framework to establish when a defendant owed you an affirmative duty to guard against third-party harm. Call (213) 645-2246 for a free, confidential consultation.

Contact Trembach Law Firm at (818) 514-7680 for a confidential consultation.

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