The negligence analysis in Oregon doesn't have to be special.

Traditional negligence works just fine.

While I was out on paternity leave, I missed a big Oregon Supreme Court case on negligence. In Stone v. Witt, 374 Or 524 (2025), the plaintiff’s spouse was killed in a car crash, where the other driver had become addicted to a host of drugs she had been prescribed. The plaintiff sued the medical providers, alleging that they were negligent in prescribing the driver these drugs despite her history of substance abuse. The Oregon Supreme Court concluded that plaintiff’s case could proceed.

A. Takeaways

• Professionals who have a special relationship with clients can still be held liable for traditional negligence, not just special relationship negligence.

• Medical providers are not insulated from negligence suits when third-parties are harmed by prescription decisions.

• Traditional negligence claims against professionals may still need to prove breach of a professional standard of care.

B. Summary of the Case

Here’s the current legal landscape, according to the Oregon Supreme Court. There are two theories of negligence in Oregon: (1) traditional negligence based on foreseeable risk of harm, and (2) negligence based on a special relationship. The traditional negligence analysis only covers a “protected interest,” which is generally the right to be free from physical harm. Traditional negligence liability does not extend to solely economic or emotional harm. Nor does it cover cases where a defendant fails to intervene in a situation she did not create. But in cases where the defendant has a special relationship with the plaintiff—like a medical professional—these excluded categories of damages are available.

Defendants argued that, as medical professionals, they could only be liable for negligence when they had a special relationship with the plaintiff—i.e., with people they provided medical care to. In other words, they can’t be liable for traditional negligence.

The Oregon Supreme Court rejected this theory. Though it’s true that a professional relationship can change the negligence analysis by altering duties, this doesn’t insulate professionals from traditional negligence liability when they create a foreseeable risk of harm. So, the question for a traditional negligence case in the medical context is whether the defendants unreasonably created a foreseeable risk of harm in light of the degree of care exercised by the ordinary careful physician.

The court also rejected defendants’ request to limit liability for medical professionals as a result of drug prescriptions unless the person harmed has a special relationship. The court recognized that the drug prescription process is complex, but noted that the plaintiff still needed to establish that the risk of harm was unreasonable (as compared to other medical professionals), and that the harm was foreseeable. For these reasons, the court concluded that liability is limited enough that a blanket ban on liability in these circumstances was unnecessary.

C. Parting Thoughts

I find this case a bit puzzling, because my understanding of traditional negligence in Oregon was that—unlike negligence law in most states—there isn’t a duty/breach analysis, but just a foreseeability analysis (per Fazzolari). Yet, the Oregon Supreme Court kept restating that the plaintiff would need to prove that the defendants here acted “unreasonably,” which requires looking at how a reasonable medical professional would act in these circumstances. That strikes me as a classic standard-of-care question that you would usually only see in special relationship cases. In other words, the court seems to have merged the two negligence threads: medical professionals can be liable to third-parties in traditional negligence, but those third-parties still need to show that they breached their professional duty of care. I’ll be curious how courts interpret this opinion in that light.