Hazing Lawsuits: Liability, Damages, and New Laws

Hazing lawsuits are civil claims brought by injured victims or the families of those killed during hazing, seeking money damages and reforms from the people and institutions responsible. Depending on what happened, a single case may name individual participants, a local fraternity chapter, the national organization, the university or school district, and specific coaches or administrators. Recoveries have ranged from a few thousand dollars to $14 million, and a wave of new state laws, a 2024 federal transparency statute, and a 2026 federal appeals ruling have expanded what plaintiffs can pursue.

Who Can Be Sued

Hazing cases almost always name multiple defendants, because the conduct usually involves many hands and at least one institution that failed to stop it.

Individual participants face the most direct claims: negligence, battery, assault, and wrongful death. Some state civil hazing statutes make these claims easier to win. Ohio’s civil anti-hazing law, for example, lets victims sue individual students, chapter officers, and university officials, and it bars defendants from arguing that the victim consented to the hazing or assumed the risk.¹ Bystanders can be on the hook as well. A January 2018 Illinois Supreme Court ruling in the Bogenberger case allowed claims to proceed against individual fraternity members and the sorority women present at the event where David Bogenberger died, and that ruling was instrumental in pushing the case toward a $14 million settlement with more than 40 defendants.²

Universities can be sued on several theories. Courts have applied negligence frameworks that ask whether the school knew or should have known about dangerous hazing and failed to act. In Furek v. University of Delaware (1991), the court held that a university could not abandon its duty to protect students once it had knowledge of dangerous practices. In Knoll v. Board of Regents (1999), a court recognized a landowner-invitee duty to protect students from foreseeable hazing on campus. Adopting written anti-hazing policies does not necessarily shield an institution; courts sometimes read those policies as the school’s own acknowledgment that it has a duty to prevent hazing.³

K–12 school districts can be sued when hazing occurs in athletic programs or other school-sponsored activities. In the Mead School District case in Washington, a judge ruled on summary judgment that the district was liable for failing to protect students from foreseeable harm, violating mandatory reporting laws, and engaging in gender-based and racial discrimination before trial on damages even began.⁴

National fraternity organizations are also frequently named, though they are often the hardest defendants to actually collect from. The reason is explained below.

Why Collecting From a National Fraternity Is Difficult

Many national fraternities have built an insurance structure that pushes financial responsibility away from the national organization and onto individual members. An investigative report found that nationals often follow a doctrine known as “conscious separation,” deliberately keeping a hands-off posture toward local chapter activities on the theory that less involvement means less liability. An internal Fraternity Executives Association memo told leaders that “prior knowledge of improper acts is fatal” to the organization’s legal position.⁵

Many national organizations own stakes in their own insurance companies and collect premiums through student dues, yet those policies routinely exclude coverage for undergraduates involved in hazing. Victims are sometimes directed to look to the individual members’ personal homeowners’ insurance rather than the national’s own liability policy.⁵ Nationals can still be reached, as the $7 million Pi Kappa Alpha payment in the Stone Foltz case and the Beta Theta Pi settlement in the Piazza case show, but the structure explains why plaintiffs’ lawyers typically pursue every available defendant rather than relying on the national alone.

What Damages Are Available

Plaintiffs typically seek compensatory damages for medical expenses, lost wages, and pain and suffering. Wrongful death claims allow families to recover for the loss of a child’s life and the emotional harm that follows. Punitive damages are available in many jurisdictions where the defendant’s conduct is found to be particularly reckless or egregious.

Settlements often include non-monetary terms. The Piazza family’s September 2018 settlement with Beta Theta Pi included a 17-point reform agreement requiring all chapter houses to be alcohol- and substance-free by August 2020, and Penn State pledged $2 million toward a research center for fraternity and sorority reform and permanently banned the chapter.⁶⁷ The Kingfisher Public Schools settlement required the district to permanently bar the head coach and implement mandatory anti-hazing training.⁸

A civil hazing case can move forward even when prosecutors decline to file criminal charges, and the burden of proof is lower: a preponderance of the evidence rather than beyond a reasonable doubt. Timing matters. Statutes of limitations for personal injury claims generally run two to three years depending on the state, though the clock may be paused for victims who were minors when the hazing occurred.⁹

What Settlements and Verdicts Have Looked Like

The range of outcomes is wide. Jury verdicts have been as low as $3,000 in a 2012 Kentucky sorority hazing case and as high as $14 million in the 2001 University of Miami hazing death of Chad Meredith. Settlements have ranged from $50,000 in a 2025 Pennsylvania school district case involving sexual assault hazing up to the $14 million Bogenberger settlement.¹⁰

Several widely cited cases give useful benchmarks:

Bogenberger (Northern Illinois University, 2018): $14 million settlement with more than 40 defendants after the 2012 alcohol-poisoning death of freshman David Bogenberger during a Pi Kappa Alpha event. His blood alcohol content was.35.¹¹
Piazza (Penn State, 2018): Undisclosed settlements with both Penn State and the Beta Theta Pi national organization after Timothy Piazza’s February 2017 death, with the fraternity agreeing to the 17-point reform plan described above.⁶
Foltz (Bowling Green State, 2021 death): More than $10 million total — $7 million from Pi Kappa Alpha and $3 million from the university — after Stone Foltz was forced to drink a bottle of bourbon during an initiation.¹⁰
Gruver (LSU, 2023 verdict): A jury awarded $6.1 million to the family of Max Gruver, who died in 2017 after a forced-drinking ritual at Phi Delta Theta, with a separate $875,000 settlement from LSU itself.¹⁰
Kingfisher Public Schools (Oklahoma, 2023): $5 million settlement in a federal lawsuit alleging systematic hazing and physical abuse in the high school football program. The financial fallout forced the small district to cut 22 staff positions after a county board rejected a property tax increase to cover the payments.¹²

Hazing Lawsuits Beyond Fraternities

Fraternity cases get most of the headlines, but hazing litigation increasingly involves high school and college athletic programs, marching bands, and other student organizations.

The Mead School District trial in Spokane, Washington, is a current example. Court documents allege that during a 2023 football camp at Eastern Washington University, white upperclassmen targeted younger Black teammates, pinning them down and using a massage gun on their genitals while others recorded the assaults. A similar ritual reportedly occurred at the prior year’s camp.¹³ Five student-athletes filed suit; two settled before trial. Opening statements began on June 17, 2026, with the plaintiffs’ attorney arguing for damages between $20 million and $50 million, and a separate federal lawsuit by another former player seeks $50 million from both the district and Eastern Washington University.¹⁴

Marching band hazing has produced some of the most consequential litigation. Robert Champion, a 26-year-old drum major in the Florida A&M University Marching 100, died within an hour of being beaten during a ritual called “Crossing Bus C” on a parked bus in Orlando in November 2011. The Florida Supreme Court unanimously upheld the manslaughter and hazing conviction of the ringleader in December 2018, rejecting arguments that the state’s hazing statute was unconstitutionally vague.¹⁵

New fraternity cases continue to be filed. In November 2025, the family of Leonel Bermudez filed a $10 million lawsuit against Pi Kappa Phi and the University of Houston after Bermudez was hospitalized for severe rhabdomyolysis and acute kidney failure following forced extreme exercise during the fall 2025 pledge process. The complaint also alleges waterboarding, forced consumption of food until vomiting, and striking with wooden paddles. Pi Kappa Phi closed the Houston chapter after the hospitalization.¹⁶

The Laws That Now Apply

State Anti-Hazing Statutes

Forty-four states have laws that specifically prohibit hazing; six states have no statute defining or prohibiting it: Alaska, Hawaii, Montana, New Mexico, South Dakota, and Wyoming.¹⁷ Thirteen states, including Florida, Texas, California, Pennsylvania, and Louisiana, treat hazing as a felony when it causes death or serious injury. In most other states with hazing statutes, the offense is a misdemeanor.

Pennsylvania’s Timothy J. Piazza Antihazing Law, signed in October 2018, has become a model. It creates a tiered penalty system — basic hazing is a summary offense, hazing that causes bodily injury is a third-degree misdemeanor, and aggravated hazing resulting in serious bodily injury or death is a third-degree felony. It requires schools to adopt written anti-hazing policies, publish them, and issue biannual reports on violations. It eliminates consent as a defense, and it includes a safe harbor granting immunity to individuals who call 911 for someone in medical danger during a hazing incident and remain on the scene until help arrives.¹⁷¹⁸

Texas classifies hazing that causes death as a state jail felony, imposes fines of $5,000 to $10,000 on organizations that condone it, and requires postsecondary institutions to maintain public reports of hazing disciplinary actions and convictions for the preceding three years.¹⁹ New Jersey’s 2021 statute makes hazing resulting in death or serious bodily injury a third-degree crime, imposes fines up to $15,000 on organizations for repeat violations, and extends reporting and policy requirements to both colleges and K–12 schools.²⁰

The Stop Campus Hazing Act

For decades, hazing regulation was a state matter. That changed on December 23, 2024, when President Biden signed the Stop Campus Hazing Act. The Act amends the Clery Act, now renamed the Jeanne Clery Campus Safety Act, and imposes new obligations on every college and university receiving federal financial aid.²¹

Covered institutions must collect statistics on reported hazing incidents and include them in their annual security reports, starting with data collected from January 1, 2025. Anti-hazing policies and prevention programs had to be in place by June 23, 2025. By December 23, 2025, each institution had to publish a Campus Hazing Transparency Report on its website listing the names of student organizations found to have violated hazing standards, descriptions of the violations, and relevant dates, with updates at least twice a year. The first annual security reports containing hazing statistics are due by October 1, 2026.²¹ The Act does not create a private right to sue, but its public reporting requirements make it harder for universities to claim ignorance of chapter misconduct in civil litigation.

Title IX After C.W. v. Piedmont City School District

A June 2026 ruling from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit broke new ground by holding that same-sex student hazing can constitute sexual harassment under federal law. In C.W. v. Piedmont City School District, No. 24-12547, an Alabama high school football player alleged that teammates repeatedly attempted to insert a car key into his anus as part of a longstanding team ritual. Chief Judge William Pryor, writing for the panel, vacated the district court’s dismissal and sent the case back, finding that the student had plausibly alleged both a Title IX sexual harassment claim and an Equal Protection violation by the school’s football coach.²²²³ For victims whose hazing involved sexual contact, Title IX now sits alongside state tort law as a possible route to recovery against federally funded schools.

Between 2000 and 2023, at least 67 young men died in fraternity-related hazing incidents.⁵ With transparency requirements now in effect and federal courts expanding the civil rights theories available to victims, the pool of defendants and the paper trail against them are both larger than they have ever been.

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