Jumat, 07 Maret 2014
Concussion Awareness Event at the Indiana Tech Law School
The Indiana Tech Law School is pleased to present a timely concussion awareness event focusing on preventing brain injury in student athletes. This event entitled "Your Role in Preventing Brain Injury in Student Athletes" will occur on March 11th, at 6 p.m. in Fort Wayne, IN, at the Schaefer Gymnasium on the Indiana Tech campus. Chris Nowinski, the co-director of the Center for the Study of Traumatic Encephalopathy at Boston University School of Medicine, will provide the keynote address. The event is free and open to the public.
Kamis, 06 Maret 2014
Vijay Singh v. PGA Tour: Next Steps
Vijay Singh's lawsuit threatens to expose the secretive ways the PGA Tour doles out punishment to Tour players in violation of its Anti-Doping Program. In this new video for Golf.com, I tell Jessica Marksbury why fighting a 34-time Tour winner won't be easy:
2014 DePaul Journal of Sports Law and Contemporary Problems Symposium
Senin, 03 Maret 2014
The Role of Fans
1. Catalyzing Fans
Two of our own contributors--Michael McCann and Howard Wasserman--collaborated with Dan Markel to write a law review article titled "Catalyzing Fans." You may download this paper here. According to the authors:
"This paper proposes the development of Fan Action Committees (“FACs”), which, like their political counterpart (PACs), could mobilize and empower fans to play a larger role in the decision-making associated with which “production teams” the talent will work. We outline two institutional options: FACs could directly compensate talent by crowdfunding, or they could make donations to charities favored by talent. We then discuss both obstacles and objections from a variety of policy and legal perspectives ranging from competitive balance to distributive justice. Finally, we consider possible extensions of the FAC model as well as offer some ruminations on why FACs haven’t already developed.
Importantly, FACs create the potential for more efficient valuations of talent by registering not only the number of fans but also the intensity of their preferences. This insight, which stresses the upside of price discrimination, has relevance for a wide range of human endeavor where bilateral contracts have third party externalities that are not currently calibrated or adequately valued."
[Editor's Note: This piece is currently being reviewed by law reviews and journals. If you are interested in publishing this article, please contact Professor Markel immediately and directly]
2. Fans Paying College Athletes
Last year, I authored an article for The Huffington Post titled "Time to Embrace Change in College Athletics." I wrote, in part, that:
"At some point in the not too distant future, the structure of college athletics as we know it will change. There are a multitude of possibilities of what this future world may look like -- and it may be far stranger than either George Orwell or Aldous Huxley could predict. Open markets and competitive bidding wars for high school players, salary caps for conferences, revenue sharing, agent representation and sponsorship deals for college athletes, and maybe even a student athlete union all within the realm of possibility."Introducing FanPay, the brainchild of Tony Klausing. Tony writes: "The idea is that fans would contribute to a pot of money to pay student athletes. This money is escrowed, then when the student graduates, he has the right to claim the funds--or else are refunded to the contributor in full." To see a beta of this website, check it out here. If you'd like to contact Tony directly with thoughts or comments, you can email him at: tony@prizl.org.
Minggu, 02 Maret 2014
New Sports Law Scholarship
Recently published scholarship includes:
Marisa G. Huber, Exposed?! The applicability of US maritime law to foreign sailors competing for foreign teams in the 34th America’s Cup San Francisco, 25 UNIVERSITY S.F. MARITIME LAW JOURNAL 209 (2012-13)
Robert H. Lattinville, and Bennett H. Speyer, The modern athletic director: rising expectations, risks and rewards, 12 VIRGINIA SPORTS AND ENTERTAINMENT LAW JOURNAL 232 (2013)
Mark W. Lenihan, Comment, Major League Soccer scores an own goal: a successful joint venture attains market power in an international sport, 62 DEPAUL LAW REVIEW 881 (2013)
Tiffany Lee, Note, Fan activities from P2P file sharing to fansubs and fan fiction: motivations, policy concerns, and recommendations, 14 TEXAS REVIEW OF ENTERTAINMENT AND SPORTS LAW 181 (2013)
Frank J. Marallo, Jr., Note, Permeating the good old boys club: why holding the commissioner of baseball to a fiduciary duty of loyalty is in the “best interests” of the game, 7 BROOKLYN JOURNAL CORPORATE FINANCE AND COMMERCIAL LAW 475 (2013)
Cassie Merkel, Comment, Misspent money: how inequities in athletic funding in New Jersey public schools may be the key to underperformance, 23 SETON HALL JOURNAL SPORTS AND ENTERTAINMENT LAW 385 (2013)
Brian L. Porto, Can the NCAA enforcement process protect children from abuse in the wake of the Sandusky scandal?, 22 WIDENER LAW JOURNAL 555 (2013)
Kemper C. Powell, Note, Beyond Brady and Anthony: the contemporary role of antitrust law in the collective bargaining process, 14 TEXAS REVIEW OF ENTERTAINMENT AND SPORTS LAW 147 (2013)
J. Brad Reich, When “getting your bell rung” may lead to “ringing the bell”: potential compensation for NFL player concussion-related injuries, 12 VIRGINIA SPORTS AND ENTERTAINMENT LAW JOURNAL 198 (2013)
Robert M. Sagerian, Note, A penalty flag for preemption: the NFL concussion litigation, tortious fraud, and the steel curtain defense of Section 301 of the Labor Management Relations Act, 35 THOMAS JEFFERSON LAW REVIEW 229 (2013)
Jeffrey Standen, Assumption of risk in NFL concussion litigation: the offhand empiricism of the courtroom, 8 FIU LAW REVIEW 71 (2012)
Patrick L. Stewart, Comment, International student athletes in the NCAA: professionals or exploited children?, 35 HOUSTON JOURNAL OF INTERNATIONAL LAW 219 (2013)
Cyntrice Thomas et al., The treatment of non-team sports under Section One of the Sherman Act, 12 VIRGINIA SPORTS AND ENTERTAINMENT LAW JOURNAL 296 (2013)
Matthew L. Winkel, Note, The not-so-artful dodger: the McCourt-Selig battle and the powers of the Commissioner of Baseball, 31 CARDOZO ARTS AND ENTERTAINMENT LAW JOURNAL 539 (2013)
Kyle R. Wood, Note, NCAA student-athlete health care: antitrust concerns regarding the insurance coverage certification requirement, 10 INDIANA HEALTH LAW REVIEW 561 (2013)
Joshua Winneker, Protecting the unprotected: creating an anti-retaliation policy for professional athletes that exercise their legal rights in participant vs. participant liability contact sports, 12 VIRGINIA SPORTS AND ENTERTAINMENT LAW JOURNAL (2013)
Robert H. Wright, and Josephine M. Ellis, Assumption of the risk in boat racing: a study in maritime jurisprudence. 11 LOYOLA MARITIME LAW JOURNAL 271 (2013)
Should sports leagues lead with liberty or equality rationales when taking a position on sexual orientation discrimination?
One of the great things about sports law is that nearly every legal issue will eventually become relevant to the sports industry (and, once an issue does become relevant to sports, the public will care more about it than it probably ever has before). So even though some of my writing takes me into territory that may not initially seem to apply to sports, it may soon find echoes in discussions among fans and the sports media.This past week, Arizona's governor had to decide whether or not to veto a bill that would give businesses license to refuse service to customers based on religious justifications. Most observers believed this was a thinly veiled effort to legalize discrimination against LGBT customers. Both the NFL and Major League Baseball, as well a number of individual teams, joined a chorus of voices calling for the governor to veto the bill. Which she did -- just 90 minutes after MLB weighed in on the issue.
Like MLB, the NFL also issued a statement in opposition to the legislation, and there was speculation that the League might move the Super Bowl out of the state if the bill had been signed. Spokesman Aiello delivered the message:
"Our policies emphasize tolerance and inclusiveness, and prohibit discrimination based on age, gender, race, religion, sexual orientation, or any other improper standard. We are following the issue in Arizona and will continue to do so should the bill be signed into law, but will decline further comment at this time."The statements express similar rationales -- "inclusion" (MLB) or "inclusiveness" (NFL), "acceptance" (MLB) or "tolerance".
What's interesting is that the NFL led with tolerance, which is a rationale based on liberty principles, MLB flipped the order to lead with respect and inclusion, which are rationales based on equality principles.
In a 2011 Harvard Law Review article, one professor argued that courts should lead with liberty rationales in decisions promoting civil rights, such as those relating to sexual orientation. Under this theory, the NFL approach would be preferable to MLB's - the latter, by emphasizing the need to include those different than us, could evoke "pluralism anxiety" and thus trigger a more negative reaction against a pro-rights decision (or pronouncement).
I've just posted a new paper (co-authored with FSU Law's Courtney Cahill) that makes the argument that courts shouldn't lead with liberty just to avoid a backlash by the public. Download it while it's hot! It may be that the order of rationales doesn't matter -- that's an argument we develop in our article -- but given the care the leagues put into these statements, one suspects the difference in order between the two was the product of deliberation of some form.
Sabtu, 01 Maret 2014
An Empirical Analysis of the Infield Fly Rule
The third piece in my "Infield Fly Rule Trilogy," titled An Empirical Analysis of the Infield Fly Rule, is up on SSRN. As the title suggests, I (with the help of seven FIU students, who all seemed to enjoy themselves) conducted an empirical study of the past four MLB seasons to find out the frequency of Infield Fly calls and the effectiveness of the rule in avoiding dramatically inequitable cost-benefit exchanges.
The earlier pieces can be found here, here, and here. The abstract of the new paper follows the jump.
Legal scholars have written extensively about baseball’s Infield Fly Rule -- its history and logic, its use as legal metaphor, and its cost-benefit policy rationales. This paper now conducts the first empirical analysis of the rule, exploring whether the rule’s legal and policy justifications are statistically supported. Based on a review of every fly ball caught by an infielder in the relevant game situation in Major League Baseball from 2010-2013, this paper measures the frequency and location of Infield Fly calls and the effect the rule has on individual games, all to determine whether the feared cost-benefit disparities that motivate the rule would, in fact, result absent the rule. Ultimately, the merits of the Infield Fly Rule cannot be measured empirically, at least not without resort to some ex ante value judgments; the normative conclusion one draws about these data depends on where one starts -- a supporter of the rule and a skeptic both will find confirmation in the information gathered in this paper. Nevertheless, the numbers shed specific and interesting light on the realities of baseball’s most unique and famous (or infamous) play.
The earlier pieces can be found here, here, and here. The abstract of the new paper follows the jump.
Legal scholars have written extensively about baseball’s Infield Fly Rule -- its history and logic, its use as legal metaphor, and its cost-benefit policy rationales. This paper now conducts the first empirical analysis of the rule, exploring whether the rule’s legal and policy justifications are statistically supported. Based on a review of every fly ball caught by an infielder in the relevant game situation in Major League Baseball from 2010-2013, this paper measures the frequency and location of Infield Fly calls and the effect the rule has on individual games, all to determine whether the feared cost-benefit disparities that motivate the rule would, in fact, result absent the rule. Ultimately, the merits of the Infield Fly Rule cannot be measured empirically, at least not without resort to some ex ante value judgments; the normative conclusion one draws about these data depends on where one starts -- a supporter of the rule and a skeptic both will find confirmation in the information gathered in this paper. Nevertheless, the numbers shed specific and interesting light on the realities of baseball’s most unique and famous (or infamous) play.
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