In this article, the authors examine student legal claims against colleges and universities in the US and in the UK under contract, tort and public law principles, focusing particularly on the evolving legal relationship between higher education institutions and their students. The authors' goal is to provide the reader with a comparative analysis of the varied approaches taken with respect to student legal claims by the legal systems in these two countries, sharing as they do the common law tradition (and bearing in mind that, in theory, US case law can be cited in the UK courts, and vice versa. They then hope to identify some of the best and worst attributes of both systems, and to analyze whether they seem to be converging or diverging with respect to the processing and resolution of student legal claims against higher education institutions.