[Eupolis]

As a general matter....

It's pretty well established in law that when someone can cut off the flow of alcohol to a seriously drunk person, they have the duty to do just that.

In this case, it sounds like the alcohol that the students provided at least contributed to the injury that the woman suffered. Sure, some other things were factors -- the woman's emotional state might have been a factor, and the construction of the window she fell from might have been a factor. If she ended up outside that window through her own intentional act, then it sounds like the alcohol was less of a factor, and probably not enough to blame the person who served it at all. But if, drunk and disoriented, she was half-standing on her bed trying to shut the window, slipped, and blew the screen out of a properly-installed window, then it looks like the alcohol was a bigger cause of what happened. Enough to blame the person who served it? That's a harder question. After all, she drank the alcohol, and we don't let people use drunkenness as an excuse for their own negligence. But at some point that duty to cut her off might have kicked in, and the person pouring would share at least some of the blame.

As far as negligently serving her more and more alcohol is concerned, her age doesn't matter. A person can be held negligent for giving car keys to someone the person should know is too intoxicated to drive even if both people are 45.

How much does the bartender/alcohol provider have to know? How drunk does she have to look? That's a question each court struggles with, and I don't know the general standard.

The fundamental point is this: If you are in a position to prevent great harm from happening, and if you ought to be able to foresee that some kind of harm is possible, you'd better do what you can to make sure that what you're doing doesn't help to bring any kind of harm about. (Some states say that the precise harm that occurs has to be foreseeable for the negligent person to be liable, while others only say that some kind of harm had to be foreseeable. In any event, juries decide foreseeability in hindsight, so you'd better cover your behind either way.)

Whether the fraternity as a corporation should be responsible is another question that I'm not even going to try to address here. Suffice it to say that if they get sued, the legal fees they'll have to pay to have the proper work done to get them out of the case will run them several thousand dollars, and that's if they win. The person who pours alcohol for someone who gets severely intoxicated there and hurts himself or herself will pay at least as much to defend the case -- again, if he wins.