When 800 Colleges Stay Silent: What the Stop Campus Hazing Act Compliance Failure Means for Your Family
If you are reading this at 2 a.m., you already know something has gone wrong. Your child came home from a semester and told you what happened to them at a fraternity event, a band initiation, a sports team bonding ritual. Or worse — you got the call no parent should ever receive. And now you are searching for answers, and what you are finding is that the school your child trusted may have already broken the law designed to protect them.
Here is what we know as of the latest compliance data: more than 800 colleges and universities — 56% of the nearly 1,500 institutions surveyed — missed the December 23, 2025, deadline to publish their Campus Hazing Transparency Reports under the federal Stop Campus Hazing Act. One-quarter of schools provide no hazing information on their websites at all. Only 42% offer an online form to report hazing. This is not a minor paperwork problem. It is a mass failure of the federal law written after decades of student deaths — and if your child was harmed by hazing at a school that hid its prior violations, that silence may be the most powerful evidence in your case.
We are Attorney911 — The Manginello Law Firm, PLLC. Our managing partner, Ralph Manginello, is lead counsel in an active $10 million hazing lawsuit against Pi Kappa Phi and the University of Houston, filed in Harris County in November 2025. We know this fight from the inside. We know what universities do to protect their reputations, what Greek organizations do to shield their chapters, and what evidence disappears before families even know they have a case. If your child has been hurt — or if you have lost a child — call us at 1-888-ATTY-911. The consultation is free, and we do not get paid unless we win your case.
What Is the Stop Campus Hazing Act and Why Does Compliance Matter?
The Stop Campus Hazing Act (SCHA) was signed into law on December 23, 2024. It amends the Clery Act — the federal campus safety reporting law that already required colleges to disclose crime statistics — to add a new mandate: every college and university that participates in federal financial aid programs must publish a Campus Hazing Transparency Report (CHTR) on its website. The inaugural report, covering every substantiated hazing violation with a final finding on or after July 1, 2025, was due by December 23, 2025 — exactly one year after the act was signed.
The federal framework that governs this is straightforward in its scope: the Stop Campus Hazing Act and the Clery Act work together to mandate specific crime reporting and transparency on campus. Failure to comply can result in fines from the U.S. Department of Education and loss of Title IV federal funding. But the civil implications are what matter to your family — because a school’s failure to comply with a federal transparency mandate is not just an administrative oversight. In jurisdictions that recognize statutory negligence, it is evidence of a breach of the standard of care.
“Many campuses are falling short of the spirit of the law. The concerning part is how many campuses still seem to be treating hazing as something to manage quietly, rather than confront openly.”
That is the assessment of a leading hazing researcher and director of a university hazing prevention lab — not a lawyer’s argument, but a scholar’s observation that campuses are choosing silence over transparency. When a university chooses silence, and a student is harmed because parents and students could not see the school’s own record of prior hazing violations, that choice becomes the foundation of a negligence case.
The December 23 Deadline Failure: By the Numbers
The compliance data paints a picture of deliberate institutional silence, not innocent confusion:
- 56% of surveyed campuses — over 800 institutions — failed to publish their required Campus Hazing Transparency Reports by the deadline
- 25% of schools provide no hazing information on their websites whatsoever — not a policy, not a report, not a reporting form
- 71% of campuses maintain a formal hazing policy (which the federal law requires), but only 42% provide an online form to report hazing
- 80% of the largest colleges and universities in each state are in compliance — including major institutions like Johns Hopkins, Oklahoma State, Purdue, the University of Central Florida, the University of Colorado-Boulder, the University of Michigan, the University of Oregon, and the University of Washington
That last statistic tells the most important story. The biggest, best-resourced schools managed to comply. Smaller schools cited fewer resources and staff. But the law does not have a resource exception. A school that receives federal financial aid money owes the same transparency whether it has 40,000 students or 400. And the gap between the large schools that complied and the smaller schools that did not reveals what this really is: a choice about priorities. The schools that complied treated transparency as a legal duty. The schools that did not treated it as optional — and they bet that no one would notice.
We noticed. And when a hazing injury happens at one of those non-compliant schools, the fact that the school was already in violation of federal law when your child was harmed is evidence we use.
How Non-Compliance Proves University Negligence
When a university fails to publish its Campus Hazing Transparency Report, four legal theories become available to a family bringing a hazing lawsuit. Each one turns the school’s silence into a weapon against it.
Negligence Per Se. In jurisdictions that recognize statutory negligence, a violation of a federal safety statute is itself evidence of a breach of the standard of care — or in some states, negligence as a matter of law. The SCHA was written to inform parents and students of campus safety risks. When a school fails to publish the report, it violates the exact duty the law created, and the harm that follows from the missing information — a student who joined an organization without knowing its prior substantiated hazing violations — is the precise harm the statute was designed to prevent.
Negligent Misrepresentation and Omission. By failing to publish the required CHTR, the university effectively misrepresented the safety of its campus to prospective students and their parents. Families rely on the information a school provides — or fails to provide — when deciding where to enroll, what organizations to join, and what risks exist. A school that suppresses its hazing record has induced reliance on a false safety profile. When that false profile leads a student to join an organization with a hidden history of hazing, the school’s omission is a proximate cause of the injury.
Premises Liability. A university that is aware of prior substantiated hazing violations — but suppresses them — has failed to protect its invitees (students) from foreseeable criminal or dangerous acts of third parties. The Greek organizations, athletic teams, and student groups where hazing occurs are not strangers to the campus. They are sanctioned, recognized, and often housed by the university. When the school knows an organization has hazed before and does not disclose it, does not suspend the organization, and does not warn new members, it has breached the duty of care owed to every student who enters that environment.
The Assumption-of-Risk Defense Is Defeated. One of the most common defenses in hazing litigation is the argument that the student voluntarily participated in the activity and assumed the risk. But the SCHA creates a federal floor for transparency that defeats this defense: a student cannot meaningfully assume the risk of joining an organization with a history of hazing if the school was legally required to disclose that history and failed to do so. The student lacked the information necessary to appreciate the true danger. That is not assumption of risk — that is a trap set by institutional silence.
Who Is Liable When Hazing Happens at a Non-Compliant School?
A hazing case is almost never a single defendant. The liability spreads across multiple layers, each with its own insurance, its own defense lawyers, and its own incentive to point at someone else.
The University Board of Regents or Trustees. The non-delegable duty to maintain a safe educational environment rests here. The university’s failure to comply with the SCHA and Clery Act is the institution’s own failure, not a contractor’s. The board approved the budget that left compliance understaffed. The administration chose not to publish the report. This is the deepest pocket and the defendant with the most direct duty to the student.
University Administrative Officers. The Dean of Students, the Greek Life office, the Title IX coordinator, the Clery Act compliance coordinator — these are the individuals whose job it was to know about hazing, report it, and publish the transparency report. Their internal communications — emails about which violations to disclose, memos about the deadline, notes about what was “manageable” versus what was “confrontable” — are the documents that prove the silence was deliberate.
Greek Organizations — Local and National. The local chapter of the fraternity or sorority where the hazing occurred has direct liability for the activity. But the national organization may also bear responsibility — for failing to supervise its chapter, for ignoring prior complaints, for maintaining a culture that tolerated hazing. The national organization often carries its own insurance, separate from the university’s, and a campus hazing lawsuit must reach both.
Property Owners and Fraternity Housing Corporations. Many fraternity houses are owned by separate housing corporations or alumni associations, not by the national organization or the university. The property owner has a premises-liability duty to protect people lawfully on the property from foreseeable harm. When hazing occurs in a fraternity house with a known history of the same conduct, the housing corporation’s failure to act is its own negligence.
The Evidence Clock: What Exists, Who Holds It, and How Fast It Dies
This is where the urgency of a hazing case becomes real. The evidence that proves the university knew about prior hazing and chose silence is perishable — and some of it is already dying.
Archived University Website Snapshots. This is the single most time-sensitive piece of evidence in an SCHA non-compliance case. The university’s website is updated daily. If the school was non-compliant on December 23, 2025, but quietly posts a report weeks later after public pressure or media scrutiny, the gap between the deadline and the posting is the proof of non-compliance. Web archive services capture snapshots of websites over time — but the university’s own internal website management logs, showing when the CHTR was actually published, are held by the school’s IT department and may be overwritten on routine backup cycles. A preservation letter demanding the university freeze its website version history, CMS logs, and publication timestamps must go out immediately.
Internal University Compliance Communications. The emails, Slack messages, and meeting notes among the Clery Act coordinator, the Dean of Students, the general counsel’s office, and the provost about the SCHA deadline are the documents that prove whether the failure to report was intentional, negligent, or a resource problem. These are subject to standard 1-to-3-year retention cycles in many university records-management policies. The longer a family waits to contact a lawyer, the more of this internal record legally disappears.
Clery Act Coordinator Files. The Clery Act coordinator is the university employee responsible for compiling and publishing the annual security report and, now, the Campus Hazing Transparency Report. This person’s files contain the substantiated violations that should have been disclosed to the public. Those files are the proof of prior knowledge — the university’s own record of hazing incidents it investigated, substantiated, and then failed to report. Demand these files in the preservation letter. They are the heart of the case.
National Chapter Disciplinary Records. If the hazing occurred in a Greek organization, the national headquarters maintains disciplinary records for every chapter — suspensions, probations, charter revocations, incident reports. These records establish whether the organization had a history of violence that both the university and the national organization knew about. They require a subpoena to the national headquarters, and they are held on the national organization’s own retention schedule.
The preservation letter goes out the day you call us. Not after. Not when the case is filed. The day you pick up the phone. Because every day that passes is a day the university can update its website, “reorganize” its compliance files, and let its internal emails cycle off the server. The preservation demand freezes those records in place and creates a spoliation claim if the university destroys them after receiving it.
The Medicine of Hazing: What Happens to the Body
Hazing injuries run a spectrum from psychological trauma to death, and the mechanism of harm is almost always foreseeable — which is why the school’s failure to warn is so devastating.
Alcohol Poisoning and Acute Intoxication. The most common hazing mechanism is forced or coerced consumption of large quantities of alcohol. The body’s blood alcohol concentration rises past the point of impairment into poisoning: vomiting, loss of consciousness, suppressed gag reflex, aspiration, respiratory depression, and death. A blood alcohol level above 0.30 is life-threatening; levels above 0.40 can be fatal. The students who survive acute alcohol poisoning may suffer hypoxic brain injury from the period of depressed breathing — a traumatic brain injury that does not always show up on a standard CT scan but leaves the survivor with lasting cognitive deficits, memory problems, and personality changes.
Physical Assault and Blunt Trauma. Paddling, beating, “boxing matches,” and physical “tests” designed to break a pledge’s will produce real injuries: fractured ribs, ruptured spleens, internal bleeding, kidney damage from blows to the flank, and traumatic brain injury from falls or strikes to the head. A single severe blow to the abdomen can rupture a spleen that bleeds internally for hours before the victim collapses — and by then, the delay in treatment has turned a survivable injury into a life-threatening one.
Forced Exercise and Heat Exhaustion. Pledges forced to perform calisthenics, runs, or “workouts” in extreme conditions suffer exertional rhabdomyolysis — the same muscle destruction that crushes the kidneys we see in entrapment cases. The muscle protein myoglobin floods the bloodstream, clogs the kidney’s filtering tubules, and causes acute kidney injury that can require dialysis and may leave the survivor with permanent renal damage. Combined with dehydration and heat, this mechanism kills.
Sleep Deprivation and Psychological Trauma. Hazing rituals that deprive pledges of sleep for days, subject them to humiliation, isolation, and threats, produce post-traumatic stress disorder, major depressive disorder, and anxiety disorders. The psychological injuries are real, diagnosable, and compensable — and the defense’s favorite move is to call them “subjective” or “pre-existing.” The counter is the same one we use in any invisible-injury case: the DSM-5 diagnostic criteria, validated clinical instruments, and the testimony of treating clinicians.
Death. When hazing kills, it kills through alcohol poisoning, hypoxic brain injury, blunt trauma, aspiration, falls from heights during impaired states, and suicide in the months following psychological destruction. A wrongful death claim in a hazing case carries the full weight of a life cut short — the lost earnings, the lost companionship, the lost future, and the conscious pain and suffering the student endured before death.
What a Hazing Case Is Worth
Hazing cases involving death or permanent disability frequently reach seven-to-eight-figure settlements or verdicts because of the egregious nature of ritualized abuse and the profound breach of trust between the institution and the family. The failure to comply with federal reporting requirements acts as a multiplier for punitive exposure.
Economic Damages. Past and future medical expenses — including hospitalization, rehabilitation, ongoing therapy, medication, and, in catastrophic cases, lifetime care. Lost wages and lost earning capacity — a student whose brain injury prevents them from completing their degree and entering their chosen profession has lost decades of income. Household services — the value of the work the student can no longer do for themselves or their family. Funeral and burial costs in wrongful-death cases.
Non-Economic Damages. Pain and suffering — what the student endured during the hazing event and its aftermath. Mental anguish — the psychological injuries, the nightmares, the loss of trust. Loss of enjoyment of life — the activities, relationships, and experiences the injury took away. In wrongful-death cases, the family’s loss of companionship, society, and guidance.
Punitive Damages. Where a university intentionally withheld its CHTR to protect its brand — demonstrating a reckless disregard for the lives of students — punitive damages are highly viable. The evidence of non-compliance is the evidence of conscious indifference: the school knew the law, knew the deadline, and chose not to comply. That choice, when it leads to a student being harmed by an organization whose prior violations were hidden, is the predicate for punishment damages.
Case value ranges in hazing litigation: lower-end cases with significant but not catastrophic injuries typically resolve in the $1.5 million to $3 million range. Cases involving permanent disability or death, especially with strong punitive-damages evidence like SCHA non-compliance, can reach $5 million to $15 million and beyond. We are currently litigating a $10 million hazing lawsuit — the Bermudez v. Pi Kappa Phi / University of Houston case — and the scope of that litigation informs what we know these cases are worth.
Past results depend on the facts of each case and do not guarantee future outcomes. Every hazing case is built on its own specific facts, and the value of yours depends on the severity of the injury, the strength of the evidence, the defendant’s resources, and the law of the jurisdiction where the case is filed.
The Insurance-Adjuster Playbook: What the University’s Lawyers Will Do
The university’s insurance carrier and its in-house counsel have a playbook for hazing cases. We know it because Lupe Peña, our associate attorney, spent years on the other side — inside a national insurance-defense firm, in the rooms where claims like yours are valued, denied, and delayed. Here is what they will do, and here is what we do about it.
Play 1: The “We Did Not Know” Defense. The university’s lawyers will argue the school had no actual knowledge of the specific hazing activity and therefore cannot be liable for what the fraternity did in private. The counter: the SCHA exists because Congress concluded that universities do know — or are legally required to know — about hazing on their campuses. The Clery Act coordinator files, the Dean of Students’ incident reports, the prior complaints about the same organization — these are the records that prove the school knew. And the school’s own failure to publish the CHTR, which was supposed to contain those substantiated violations, is itself the evidence that the knowledge existed and was suppressed.
Play 2: The “Student Assumed the Risk” Defense. The defense will argue the pledge voluntarily participated in the activity, signed a waiver, or knew hazing was part of the culture. The counter: the SCHA was written to defeat this defense. A student cannot assume the risk of joining an organization with a history of hazing if the school was legally required to disclose that history and failed to do so. The student lacked the information to appreciate the danger. Assumption of risk requires knowing acceptance of a known risk — not blind reliance on a school that broke the law to keep the risk hidden.
Play 3: The Fast, Quiet Settlement Offer. Within weeks of the incident, the university’s carrier may approach the family with a settlement offer — sometimes before the family has even hired a lawyer. The offer will sound substantial. It will come with a release that extinguishes every claim against the university, the Greek organization, and the housing corporation. The counter: the first offer from an insurance company is never the full value of the case. It is a fraction — designed to close the file before the family discovers the SCHA non-compliance, the prior violations, and the internal emails that prove the silence was deliberate. The preservation letter has to go out before the first check arrives, not after.
Play 4: Blame the Student. The defense will mine the student’s social media, text messages, and prior conduct for evidence that they were a willing participant, that they drank voluntarily, that they “wanted to join.” The counter: the power imbalance in hazing is the entire point. A 18-year-old pledge surrounded by older members, desperate to belong, subjected to escalating demands — that is not voluntary participation. That is coercion, and the law recognizes it.
Play 5: Delay. The university’s lawyers will file motions to dismiss, argue jurisdictional issues, challenge standing, and stretch every procedural deadline. The goal is to exhaust the family’s resources and patience. The counter: we work on contingency, which means the firm carries the cost of the fight. The family never pays a dime out of pocket, and the firm’s resources are committed for as long as the case takes.
The Proof Story: How a Hazing Case Is Actually Built
Here is how we build a hazing case from the day you call to the day the number is on the table.
Week One: The Preservation Letter. The day you call us, a litigation-hold letter goes to the university’s general counsel, the Clery Act coordinator, the Dean of Students, the national fraternity headquarters, and the fraternity housing corporation. The letter demands preservation of the university’s website version history, its CMS publication logs, the Clery Act coordinator’s files, all incident reports involving the organization at issue, all disciplinary records for the organization, all internal communications about the SCHA deadline, all student-conduct hearing records, the national organization’s chapter disciplinary file, and the housing corporation’s maintenance and security records. Every one of those records is evidence. Every one of them can be “lost” if we do not act.
Weeks Two Through Four: The Records Demand. We use the university’s own obligations under federal law — including the Clery Act’s public-records requirements and the SCHA’s transparency mandate — to force the production of the CHTR, the prior substantiated violations, and the internal compliance file. Where the university resists, we file. Where the national organization resists, we subpoena. The insurance claim process is not where this fight is won — it is won in discovery, where the university’s own documents prove it knew about hazing and chose silence.
Months One Through Three: The Investigation. We interview witnesses — former pledges, current members, alumni, parents, Greek-life advisors, campus police. We pull the police reports, the student-conduct hearing records, the medical records, the social media posts, the text-message threads. We retain a campus-safety expert — a former university administrator or Clery Act compliance specialist who can testify that a “zero-violation report” or a missing report from a school with a Greek system is a red flag, not a clean bill of health.
Months Three Through Six: The Depositions. The Clery Act coordinator sits across the table and answers questions about what substantiated violations existed, when they were finalized, and why they were not published. The Dean of Students explains what the school knew about the organization at issue and when it knew it. The fraternity’s chapter president and risk-management chair testify about the culture, the traditions, and what the national organization was told. The university’s in-house counsel may be deposed about the decision not to comply with the SCHA deadline.
The Number. The number at the end is built from all of it — the medical bills, the lost earning capacity, the life-care plan, the pain and suffering, the family’s loss, and the punitive damages that a jury can impose when it learns the school broke federal law to protect its reputation. The university’s own non-compliance is the lever that moves the number from a settlement to the full value of the case.
The First 72 Hours: What to Do and What Not to Do
If your child has been injured in a hazing incident — or if you have lost a child — the hours and days that follow are critical for both their safety and the legal case.
Medical First. If your child is injured, get them to an emergency room. Hazing injuries can worsen over hours: alcohol poisoning can progress to aspiration, internal bleeding from blunt trauma can accumulate, rhabdomyolysis can destroy the kidneys. The medical record created in the first hours is the baseline — it documents the injury before the defense can argue it came from somewhere else. If the injury is psychological, the first therapy intake or psychiatric evaluation is the contemporaneous record that defeats the “she was already anxious” defense. Do not wait to see if they “feel better.”
Do Not Sign Anything. The university’s risk-management office, the fraternity’s national headquarters, or the fraternity’s insurance carrier may approach you with a release, a “medical authorization,” or a “statement form.” Do not sign it. Do not give a recorded statement. Do not agree to let the school “handle it internally.” Internal discipline is not accountability — it is the school managing the problem quietly, which is exactly what the SCHA was written to stop.
Do Not Post on Social Media. The defense will be watching. Every post, every photo, every comment will be screen-captured and used to minimize the injury or blame the student. Set accounts to private. Tell your child to do the same. The family’s grief is not the insurer’s evidence.
Document Everything. Preserve every text message, every email, every screenshot, every photograph from the night of the incident. If your child told a friend what happened, document that conversation — the first person a hazing victim tells is an “outcry witness,” and their account is powerful evidence. Write down the timeline while it is fresh: when your child joined the organization, what events they attended, what they told you about the process, and when the injury occurred.
Call Us. 1-888-ATTY-911. The consultation is free. We will tell you honestly whether we can help, and if we are not the right fit for your case, we will tell you that too. But if your child was harmed at a school that missed the SCHA deadline, the school’s own law-breaking may be the foundation of your case — and that evidence is on a clock.
Frequently Asked Questions
Can I sue the university if my child was hazed?
Yes. A university that recognizes, sanctions, and houses student organizations has a duty to protect its students from foreseeable harm — and hazing in Greek organizations, athletic teams, and marching bands is one of the most foreseeable dangers on a college campus. When the university knew about prior hazing (or was legally required to know and failed to comply with the SCHA), its liability extends to the harm that followed. The student does not have to have been the one hazed in the prior incidents — the school’s failure to disclose the pattern to new students is the breach of duty.
What if the school says my child “voluntarily participated” in hazing?
This is the most common defense in hazing cases, and the SCHA was written to defeat it. A student cannot voluntarily assume the risk of an activity if the school was legally required to disclose its prior hazing violations and failed to do so. The student did not have the information needed to understand the danger. Coercion, peer pressure, power imbalance, and the desire to belong are not “voluntary participation” in any meaningful legal sense — and the defense knows it.
How long do I have to file a hazing lawsuit?
The deadline to file depends on the law of the state where the university is located, the type of claim (personal injury vs. wrongful death), and whether the state has a specific anti-hazing statute with its own deadline. Some states have statutes of limitations as short as one or two years for personal injury; wrongful-death statutes vary widely. Some states toll the deadline for minors. Because the deadline is jurisdiction-specific and the evidence is perishable, the single most important step is to talk to a lawyer early — not to file suit, but to preserve the evidence before the school’s retention cycles erase it.
Does it matter that my child’s school missed the SCHA deadline?
It may matter enormously. The school’s failure to publish its Campus Hazing Transparency Report by December 23, 2025, is evidence of non-compliance with a federal safety statute. In jurisdictions that recognize statutory negligence, this violation is evidence of a breach of the standard of care — or negligence per se. It also supports a claim for negligent misrepresentation: the school’s silence induced your family to rely on a false safety profile. And it defeats the assumption-of-risk defense by showing your child lacked the information the law required the school to provide.
What if the fraternity’s national organization says the local chapter acted on its own?
The national organization is not automatically shielded from liability because it chartered a local chapter. The national sets the standards, collects the dues, controls the branding, and, in many cases, requires its own risk-management policies and reporting. When a chapter has a history of hazing incidents that the national organization knew or should have known about, the national’s failure to intervene, suspend, or revoke the charter is its own negligence. We sue both the local chapter and the national organization.
What is the difference between a hazing case and an ordinary assault case?
A hazing case is not just an assault — it is a ritualized, organized, institutionally tolerated pattern of abuse. The law in most states treats hazing as a specific offense, often with its own criminal statute and, in some states, a civil cause of action. The institutional dimension — the university’s recognition of the organization, the national organization’s charter, the housing corporation’s property — creates layers of defendants and insurance coverage that an ordinary assault case does not have. And the SCHA’s transparency requirements create a federal floor for institutional accountability that has no equivalent in ordinary assault law.
Can my child’s school retaliate against them for reporting hazing?
Federal law prohibits retaliation. The Clery Act protects crime victims and whistleblowers, and the SCHA’s reporting requirements exist specifically to prevent schools from managing hazing “quietly.” If a university disciplines, threatens, or marginalizes a student for reporting hazing, that retaliation is its own violation and its own cause of action. No school that missed the SCHA compliance deadline — already in violation of federal law — has the moral or legal standing to punish a student for exposing what the school was supposed to disclose itself.
How much does a hazing lawyer cost?
Nothing upfront. We work on contingency: 33.33% before trial and 40% if the case goes to trial. We do not get paid unless we win your case. The consultation is free. We serve families in English and in Spanish — Lupe Peña, our associate attorney, conducts full consultations in Spanish without an interpreter. Call 1-888-ATTY-911, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. You will speak to a live person, not an answering service.
The State Legal Framework: A Patchwork of Anti-Hazing Laws
Campus hazing litigation is governed by a patchwork of state anti-hazing statutes layered on top of the federal SCHA and Clery Act. Many states have enacted aggressive anti-hazing legislation in response to high-profile student deaths — states like Florida, Pennsylvania, and Ohio have laws that provide civil causes of action independent of federal law. Some of these statutes impose specific duties on universities and Greek organizations; some create criminal penalties for hazing; some eliminate charitable-immunity defenses that universities historically raised to shield themselves from liability.
The interaction between state law and federal law is what makes the SCHA non-compliance so powerful: the federal statute creates a transparency floor that applies in every state, and the state anti-hazing statutes build on that floor with their own requirements, penalties, and civil remedies. A school that violates the SCHA in a state with its own aggressive anti-hazing statute faces exposure under both — federal non-compliance as evidence of negligence, plus the state statute’s own civil or criminal consequences.
Many states have eliminated or narrowed the charitable-immunity defense that universities historically used to shield themselves from liability. In states where charitable immunity still exists in some form, the SCHA’s federal mandate may override it: a school that violates federal law to protect its reputation is not engaged in charitable activity — it is engaged in self-preservation, and the immunity doctrine was never written to protect that.
The comparative-fault rules also vary by state. Some states follow a pure comparative-fault model, where a plaintiff’s own share of fault reduces but does not bar recovery. Others follow modified comparative fault (50% or 51% bars), where a plaintiff more than half at fault cannot recover. A few states still follow contributory negligence, where any plaintiff fault bars recovery entirely. In hazing cases, the SCHA’s transparency requirement is the tool that defeats comparative-fault defenses: the student’s “fault” in joining the organization cannot be assessed without the information the school was required to provide and failed to provide.
Why This Firm
Ralph Manginello has spent 27+ years in courtrooms, including federal court, since his admission to the Texas Bar on November 6, 1998. He is the managing partner of Attorney911 — The Manginello Law Firm, PLLC. Before he was a lawyer, he was a journalist — which means he knows how to find the story the institution does not want told, how to read a document for what it omits, and how to ask the question that makes the witness on the other side of the table go quiet. He is lead counsel in the active $10 million Bermudez v. Pi Kappa Phi / University of Houston hazing lawsuit, filed in Harris County in November 2025 — a case that is teaching us, in real time, exactly how universities and Greek organizations defend themselves when the light gets turned on.
Read more about Ralph Manginello and his approach to these cases.
Lupe Peña is our associate attorney, admitted to the Texas Bar in 2012 and to the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Texas. Before he joined our firm, Lupe spent years inside a national insurance-defense firm — the rooms where adjusters and their software decide how to deny, delay, and devalue claims exactly like yours. He knows how the other side values a case, how it picks its doctors, how it uses surveillance and social media, and how it runs the clock. Now he uses that knowledge for injured clients. Lupe is fluent in Spanish and conducts full client consultations in Spanish without an interpreter.
Learn more about Lupe Peña and the advantage his insider knowledge brings.
We are based in Houston, with offices at 1177 West Loop South, Suite 1600, and 1635 Dunlavy Street. We serve Harris, Montgomery, Fort Bend, Brazoria, and Galveston counties from our Houston offices, Travis, Williamson, Hays, and Bastrop counties from our Austin office, and Jefferson, Orange, and Hardin counties from our Beaumont location. We take hazing cases in Texas and work with local counsel in other states where the SCHA’s federal mandate applies. The firm has recovered more than $50 million for injured clients — a figure that includes a $5 million-plus brain-injury settlement, a $3.8 million-plus amputation settlement, and a $2.5 million-plus truck-crash recovery.
This page is legal information, not legal advice. Past results depend on the facts of each case and do not guarantee future outcomes. Contacting the firm is free and confidential.
The High Cost of Secrecy
The trial narrative in a hazing case is simple and devastating: the university had a federal duty to tell the truth about what was happening in its fraternities, on its athletic teams, in its marching bands. It chose not to. It chose its reputation over your child’s safety. And the harm that followed — the injury, the trauma, the death — was the direct, foreseeable result of that choice.
That is the story we tell. It is the story the university’s internal emails will confirm. It is the story the Clery Act coordinator’s files will prove. It is the story the SCHA non-compliance data already tells — 800 schools, choosing silence, betting that no family would ever connect the dots between the missing report and the injured child.
We connect the dots. That is what we do.
Call 1-888-ATTY-911. Free consultation. No fee unless we win your case. Hablamos Español. 24 hours a day, 7 days a week — you will speak to a live person, not a machine. The evidence is on a clock. The school’s website is being updated. The internal emails are cycling off the server. The preservation letter goes out the day you call.