Sports Labor Law

This might provide a nice short break for anyone who is now studying for the bar but finding it impossible to stop thinking about law--even while taking a break to watch baseball highlights.

David Cone testified at Sonia Sotomayor's confirmation hearings last week (transcript here) and he also happened to throw out the first pitch at Yankee Stadium yesterday (a still-devastating curve). Cone was invited to testify on Sotomayor's behalf because he was a representative of the Major League Baseball Players Association when Sotomayor resolved baseball's most recent major labor dispute, in 1994. Here, Prof. Ilya Somin from George Mason, who also testified Thursday, mentions that Cone was a successful litigant who was testifying on behalf of a judge who made a decision in his favor.

In fact, the Supreme Court recently granted cert. in American Needle v. National Football League, which could significantly change labor relations in American professional sports, and some see Sotomayor as a potential disruption to the NFL's apparent plan to obtain antitrust exemption for all major sports leagues through that case. (Good analysis of the case is here from a practical perspective, and here from a legal perspective.)



Ernster, the Virtual Library Cat

Kangaroo Courts

The Yankees recently held their first kangaroo court in over a decade. Mariano Rivera presided as judge. The Mariners also recently held a kangaroo court, and it sounds as though Ken Griffey, Jr. had better robes than Rivera, but that neither was dressed quite as poorly as Wade Boggs when he presided over the previous Yankees kangaroo court, if you believe the rumors.

Black's says that the origin of the term "kangaroo court" is uncertain, but that it can be traced to the mid-nineteenth century American West.



Ernster, the Virtual Library Cat

The Onion on Convoluted Legal Wranglings

There was a funny article in The Onion last week about Mets third baseman David Wright appealing a check swing call to the Supreme Court. It is funny because umpires and judges have some things in common (as PrawfsBlawg points out, Chief Justice Roberts has analogized his Court to a crew of umpires), because spending years waiting for a ball-strike call exemplifies how out of sync the timing of our courts can be with real life, because a check swing involves the sort of subjective test courts like to examine at length, and because it quotes John Kruk explaining originalist interpretation.

However, although the article says that the fake case had a "convoluted" procedural history, it involved no remands, interlocutory appeals, etc. In fact, it somehow managed to skip multiple levels of the state and federal courts--just look at the chart below. (Of course, National League umpires working at Shea are not actually a court of first instance in the New York State Unified Court System.)


[Courts written in gray were skipped.]








Ernster, the Virtual Library Cat