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Salaries for College Athletes?
Last month, the New York Times Magazine ran a kick-tush article advocating paying college athletes in football and basketball for their services. The arguments have been made before in other forums,...
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Court Funding
“I have seen the future, and it’s much like the present only longer.”–Kansas City Royals closer Dan Quisenberry in 1983. When I got started as an attorney, you would report for trial in Department One...
View ArticleUsing Algorithms to Advance Accuracy: A Metadata Method to March Madness
Discovery in cases involving a high volume of data, can often feel like March Madness. A reviewer must winnow a huge field down to the “final four” of documents, those that are relevant to the...
View ArticleNobody’s Perfect
William Faulkner once said that in the world the past is past, but in the South, the past is present. As pointed out by T.J. Simers in his column March 7th in the Los Angeles Times, in Westwood, John...
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Say It Ain’t So Sean
Sean Payton, coach of the New Orleans Saints, has been banned for a year from football because his players were awarded a bounty for taking out an opposing player i.e. physically injuring him. This one...
View ArticleCulture & Commerce in Football
Intellectual property law—copyrights, patents, trademarks, and trade secrets—often attempts to balance culture and commerce. Few areas demonstrate the tension between those two vital national interests...
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Reeves Nelson Defamation Lawsuit Against Sports Illustrated
I once represented the Chief of Staff for the Governor of the State of California. He had a defamation lawsuit against the Lieutenant Governor, who was from the other political party. The merits of the...
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Exceptional Insurance: Safeguarding the Student-Athlete Superstar
Sam Kahn, Jr. of ESPN Radio recently reported that Johnny Manziel is exploring the option of “Exceptional Student-Athlete Disability Insurance,” provided by the NCAA. The insurance coverage is reported...
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Wise Words Tell Truths (at Least On Insurance Applications)
Suddenly you are lying by the side of the road, dazed, dusty, and injured. You know that you are not dead, but you also know that things are not good: the car is a twisted mess and your head hurts like...
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Catching the Right Analogy Before Your Jury: Boston You’re My Home
The President spoke at an interfaith service yesterday in Boston. Regardless of your politics, at moments like this, our Commanders in Chief tend to get it right. Consider George W. Bush after 9/11 or...
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Will Jason Collins Be the New "42"?
We have to start somewhere and congrats to Jason Collins for being a man of courage. In Sports Illustrated, the free agent NBA center announced that he was gay. All the pundits will have something to...
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Preempting the Players’ Claims: Why the Plaintiffs Are On a Path to...
Four thousand plus plaintiffs in the NFL Concussion Injury Litigation face an uphill battle to survive preemption and pursue their state law claims. See Amended Master Complaint at ¶¶54-57, In re...
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MLB, Ryan Braun and PEDs: The Art of Bad Negotiation
As featured on ESPN MLB, Alex Rodriguez is going down for shooting up. Unlike his fellow user, Ryan Braun, he has not cut a deal. Instead, he has bad mouthed major league baseball, darkly suggested...
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NCAA Halts Sales of Team-Related Merchandise On Its Website
The NCAA announced on Thursday, August 8, that it would no longer sell team-related merchandise through its website, ShopNCAASports.com. The revelation came after ESPN analyst, Jay Bilas announced via...
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Continuing Headaches: the Aftermath and Effects of the NFL Concussion Settlement
In late August, the NFL announced a 765 million dollar concussion settlement between itself and thousands of former NFL players. In the eyes of many sports commentators, the timing seemed somewhat...
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Simer Sues Times
T.J. Simer is suing his former employer, the LA Times, the Trib, and all affiliated companies. His columns were not full of sweetness and light, and he claims that his firing was caused by the Times’...
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On Overwork in Law and Football
Football coaches John Fox and Gary Kubick each have suffered serious health scares over the past week and a half. In Kubiak’s case, he had to be carted off right in the middle of a game. For Fox, it...
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Marvin Miller Strikes Out: Legendary Labor Leader Denied Entrance to Baseball...
The Los Angeles Times recently published an article citing the injustice of denying baseball’s great labor leader a booth in the Hall, but they do not answer the question of “why.” There certainly is...
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Getting Rid of a Bad Deal: After Decades of Payments, the NBA Buys Out the...
This one takes us back to the land of bell bottoms, super afros and bad disco. Back when there was a rival basketball league called the ABA (American Basketball League), the NBA wanted a merger....
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The Football Settlement Continued . . . or Why Judges Get to Control Their...
As covered by Sports Illustrated, Judge Anita Brody, the federal jurist assigned to supervise the football head injury cases, is questioning whether the proposed settlement is large enough to handle...
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