Tag Archives: volokh conspiracy

Court grants broad exception to athlete liability for in-sport actions

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Supreme Court of Utah: “participants in any sport are not liable for injuries caused by their conduct if their conduct was inherent in the sport.”

The court elaborated:

We think it appropriate to establish an exception to tort liability for certain injuries arising out of voluntary participation in sports. But we do not deem it appropriate to require proof that a defendant’s conduct was reckless or intentional. Nor do we think it is necessary to limit the exception to an arbitrary subcategory of “contact” sports. Instead we hold that voluntary participants in a sport cannot be held liable for injuries arising out of any contact that is “inherent” in the sport. Under our rule, participants in voluntary sports activities retain “a duty to use due care not to increase the risks to a participant over and above those inherent in the sport.” But there is no duty to lower or eliminate risks that are inherent in an activity.

Excerpts from last week’s opinion in Nixon v. Clay, which arose out of an injury sustained in a church-league basketball game, and a link to the full opinion are available here.

March Madness on the Bench: Are judges distracted by the NCAA Basketball Tourney? (via The Volokh Conspiracy)

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Past research suggests that natural preferences for leisure influence the ways in which federal judges carry out their work. We consider the extent to which incentives for leisure reduce the speed with which judges work and the quality of their output. We take advantage of a natural experiment caused by an annual sporting event that creates differential distractions across judges. Using a difference-in-differences design, among federal courts of appeals judges we show that a judge’s alma mater’s participation in the National Collegiate Athletic Association Men’s Basketball Tournament both slows the rate at which opinions are drafted and ultimately undermines the opinions’ quality, even accounting for the additional time judges spend writing them. The findings suggest that incentives for leisure influence important normative concerns for swift and high-quality justice. … Read More

(via The Volokh Conspiracy)

Baltimore Tries to Use Eminent Domain to Condemn the Preakness Stakes Horse Race (via The Volokh Conspiracy)

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preaknessBaltimore has filed a lawsuit seeking to use eminent domain to take Preakness Stakes horse race and the Pimlico racetrack, where the race is held. . . .

The Preakness is one of the Triple Crown horse races (along with Belmont and the Kentucky Derby) and therefore one of the most significant events in American horse racing. The condemnation is legally questionable. But even if the city wins the lawsuit and succeeds in taking over the Preakness, it is likely to end up a loser. … Read More

(via The Volokh Conspiracy)

How to put an end to the dark side of the Olympics (via The Volokh Conspiracy)

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The Olympics are a great sports event. But they also cause great harm. Host cities routinely lose enormous amounts of money on the games, and end up with decaying stadiums that have little or no value. Even worse, governments often forcibly displace large numbers of people from their homes and businesses in order to make room for Olympic venues. Over 1 million people lost their homes for the 2008 Beijing games alone. Brazil has similarly evicted large numbers of people for the currently ongoing Rio Olympics, and even more to build stadiums for the 2014 World Cup. Most of those evicted are the poor and people lacking in political power. The Olympics also often become propaganda showcases for authoritarian regimes, as happened win the 2008 Olympics in China, and the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi, Russia. In an earlier era, the the same problem arose on an even more egregious scale with the 1936 Olympics in Nazi Berlin, and the 1980 games in the Soviet Union.

None of this has to happen. We can reform the Olympics to put an end to it. … Read More

(via The Volokh Conspiracy)

The Redskins and The Slants: How an Asian American band name case may affect the Redskins trademark (via The Volokh Conspiracy)

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A federal district court today upheld the Trademark Trial and Appeal Board’s cancellation of the Redskins mark. A federal statute bars registrations of marks that “may disparage … persons, living or dead, institutions, beliefs, or national symbols, or bring them into contempt, or disrepute”; the district court agreed that the Redskins fell within this prohibition. This decision doesn’t bar the Redskins from using their name, but it does reduce their ability to use trademark law to stop various infringing Redskins gear.
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The analysis strikes me as unpersuasive: I don’t think that historically trademarks have been used to “communicate[] messages from the [government].” I don’t think “the publicly closely associates [trademarks] with the [government].” And while the government does have and does exercise some control over which trademarks are allowed, I don’t think that this itself can suffice to justify viewpoint discrimination, since in all viewpoint-discriminatory programs (including ones the Court has condemned), the whole dispute was about the fact that the government was trying to exercise control about what speech is allowed.

Instead, it seems to me that trademark law is much closer to the programs in which viewpoint discrimination is forbidden . . . . The special government-provided benefits given to trademark owners — or copyright owners — are similarly private speech, despite the government involvement, and the government shouldn’t selectively deny those benefits to speakers who have certain views. … Read More

(via The Volokh Conspiracy)

Yes, the Cardinals hack was a federal crime (via The Volokh Conspiracy)

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According to press reports, front-office personnel of the St. Louis Cardinals used a guessed password to gain access to a private database of player information held by the Houston Astros. Over at ESPN, legal analyst Lester Munson makes the startling claim that this may not be a crime . . . . This is just wrong. … Read More

(via The Volokh Conspiracy)

The Department of NFL Justice

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David Post writes:

The public clamor for the NFL to “do more” when confronted by evidence of serious wrongdoing in the cases of Ray Rice, Adrian Peterson, Greg Hardy, and an unfortunately large number of other cases strikes me as very troubling, and reflective of this view, apparently pretty widespread, that we can’t count on the legal system to mete out appropriate punishment in a reasonable way. We have a criminal law, one would think, to define behavior that we cannot accept as a society, and to identify and punish those who violate those norms. Many people, though, seem to want the NFL, and/or the individual NFL teams, to take over that function. It’s a kind of privatization of a public function, and, extended more broadly, its costs might be much higher than we think. Do we really think it would be a such a good idea if Microsoft, say, or General Electric, or Wal-Mart, or Amazon, or other large private employers started instituting “codes of conduct” governing employee behavior outside of work time? And if they started firing people because they received a video showing them behaving unlawfully, even heinously? And let’s see, whose interests do we think the NFL’s process for determining punishment is going to serve – the public’s? Or the NFL’s?

His full post is available here.

San Jose wants to overturn baseball’s antitrust exemption (via Volokh Conspiracy)

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federalleagueBetween 1913 and 1915, there was a third baseball league, the Federal League, competing with the two established organized leagues we already know, the National League and the American League. Players’ salaries skyrocketed, and the NL and AL ended up breaking up the FL by buying up some clubs and inducing others to leave the League. The sole remaining FL team, from Baltimore, sued the organized leagues and the National Commission, arguing that their action in breaking up the FL violated antitrust law.

In Federal Baseball Club of Baltimore, Inc. v.  National League of Professional Baseball Clubs (1922), the Supreme Court said it didn’t violate antitrust law. Justice Holmes, writing for a unanimous Court, said this didn’t fall within antitrust law because it wasn’t interstate commerce (and the presence of interstate commerce is expressly made necessary by the text of the Sherman Antitrust Act). Of course, this is contrary to many decades of later jurisprudence: there’s no way the Supreme Court would have decided this way if the case came up today.

But the Supreme Court reaffirmed its 1922 decision in a short 7-2 per curiam in Toolson v. New York Yankees (1953), saying if baseball’s exemption was wrong, Congress should fix it.
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In Flood v. Kuhn (1972), the Supreme Court reaffirmed Federal Baseball again.
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Now San Jose wants to challenge the antitrust exemption again. San Jose claims that Major League Baseball has undermined the Oakland As’ desire to move to San Jose. Of course San Jose lost in district court, but the case is being fast-tracked to the Ninth Circuit, which . . . could hear it by May. . . . Interestingly, one of the possible grounds that the Ninth Circuit could use would be to read the baseball exemption narrowly, as limited to labor issues like the reserve clause — which is how the previous cases arose — and not applicable to issues here like restraints on relocation of teams. … Read More

(via Volokh Conspiracy)

Comprehensive Super Bowl XLVIII Preview

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As you can see from the above graphic, this year’s Super Bowl, already dubbed the Snow & States’ Marketing Rights Bowl, pits New York against New Jersey in a battle for subpar beach superiority. You do not have subpar taste, however, because you’re reading ALDLAND’s Super Bowl preview, the only one you’ll need to prepare yourself for the game on Sunday. What follows is a compilation of the most interesting, entertaining, and essential Super Bowl XLVIII content, concluding with the least interesting, entertaining, and essential Super Bowl XLVIII content, my game prediction:

  • First and most important: the game begins at 6:30 Eastern on Fox.

Football is Better than Soccer: An Englishman Abandons the Beautiful Game for the NFL (via WSJ)

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In its energy and complexity, football captures the spirit of America better than any other cultural creation on this continent, and I don’t mean because it features long breaks in which advertisers get to sell beer and treatments for erectile dysfunction. It sits at the intersection of pioneering aggression and impossibly complex strategic planning. It is a collision of Hobbes and Locke; violent, primal force tempered by the most complex set of rules, regulations, procedures and systems ever conceived in an athletic framework.

Soccer is called the beautiful game. But football is chess, played with real pieces that try to knock each other’s brains out. It doesn’t get any more beautiful than that. … Read More

(via WSJ)
(HT: VC)