Hosts of sporting events bear some responsibility to provide crowd control, but as the Queens County Supreme Court recently demonstrated in McClive v. USTA, there are limits to an owner’s obligations.

In McClive, the plaintiff was a spectator at the U.S. Open in Queens.  (For the uninitiated, a day at the U.S. Open is always a day well spent, particularly in the early rounds with dozens of matches going on at any given time.)  Plaintiff alleged that while she was walking back to her car, she was shoved by someone in the crowd and injured herself after falling on a curb.  According to the plaintiff, the USTA National Tennis Center was liable because of the size of the crowd and poor lighting in the parking lot.

The court disagreed, and granted the defendants’ motion for summary judgment.  Although the court implied that there is some duty to provide some degree of crowd control, the court reasoned that there was no evidence “that the crowd was unruly and unmanageable to the extent necessary to impose liability upon the defendants.”  The court also noted that there was no evidence that insufficient lighting caused the plaintiff to fall.

Despite the duty owed by event holders, McClive is reminds us that there are reasonable limits to the duties imposed on landowners and event sponsors.