John C. Weistart

League Control of Market Opportunities: A Perspective on Competition and Cooperation in the Sports Industry

An issue unsettled for at least the past decade is the proper characterization of a professional sports league for antitrust purposes. Recent litigation over the efforts of the National Football League to block the move by the Raiders from Oakland to Los Angeles should have been the occasion for a significant judicial clarification. The Ninth Circuit decision in the case seeks to limit league discretion and give individual clubs the right to pursue their separate entrepreneurial advantage. When subjected to close examination, however, the decision appears to be premised on themes that are fundamentally inconsistent. The present article suggests that a more coherent view of the antitrust issues in league governance requires that greater weight be given to the corporate nature of the leagues enterprise. An outcome sensitive to this characteristic is more apt to satisfy the basic antitrust policy of enhancing consumer welfare. Other antitrust and public policy questions remain, but their resolution should not proceed from a conspiratorial view of league governance.

College Sports Reform: Where Are the Faculty?.

prising is the historical absence of effective faculty oversight of the educational experiences of student athletes in bigtime college programs. Among the revelations that point to a failure of faculty governance in these matters, the most embarrassing must surely be the dismal graduation rates of athletes in several basketball and football programs. Reports in the popular press indicate that 4 percent of black basketball players graduated at the University of Georgia in a recent period. At one Big Ten school, the graduation rate for all basketball players was 9 percent. At Memphis State, the NAACPand not the faculty, it might be noteddiscovered that in a ten-year period, no black basketball player graduated. The list goes on and covers twenty or more schools that should have been embarrassed.

Legal consequences of standard setting for competitive athletes with cardiovascular abnormalities

This paper addresses the issue of whether establishing consensus standards for the treatment of particular medical conditions increases a physicians exposure to legal liability. The conclusion reached is that the legal effects of standard setting, rather than representing a significant threat of liability, should be seen as beneficial to the medical profession. A fundamental point is that the legal test for liability is entirely dependent on the medical professions definition of what constitutes adequate care. The law incorporates the standard of care defined by the medical profession and does not impose an external norm. In the absence of formally stated standards, the process of defining relevant medical criteria will involve a great deal of uncertainty. Outcomes of legal contests will be affected by such extraneous factors as the relative experience of the lawyers involved, their access to knowledgeable expert witnesses, and their strategic decisions made with respect to tactics and procedures. Establishment of formal standards has the salutory effect of limiting the influence of these factors and thus reducing the randomness of the results reached. Formal standards also have the advantage of being easily replicated in unrelated proceedings and thereby contribute to the development of a consistent, evenly applied rule of liability. Finally, even if formal standards are either more, or less, progressive than the actual state of medical practice, there is relatively little risk that they will produce untoward results.