Legal News

On Mother?s Day and Baseball: The Lawsuits Continue

By Chris Herring

Is holding a promotion that recognizes Mother’s Day a nice gesture or a discriminatory one?

Thanks to a few lawsuits that have been filed in recent years, a trio of Major League Baseball teams in California have grappled with that very question.

The Oakland Athletics just lost a $510,000 suit that alleged the club discriminated against men by giving away reversible bucket hats and tote bags only to adult women that attended the game on Mother’s Day of 2004.

The plaintiffs’ lawyer in the case, whom ESPN.com columnist Rick Reilly doesn’t seem to have a lot of love for, knows a little something about such lawsuits. Alfred Rava has filed about 40 anti-male discrimination suits in the past.

Aside from the suit against Oakland, the San Diego Padres and the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim have also been served in recent years for holding similar promotions. (Click here for an earlier LB post on the Angels suit.) The Angels got their suit — also filed by Rava — thrown out, while the Padres settled theirs out of court.

Perhaps not surprisingly, all three teams have either stopped doing such promotions or have offered the giveaways to everyone rather than just women.

Rava and others have cited California’s Unruh Civil Rights Act to argue their claims, which Reilly and other critics have called attempt to exploit the law. In particular, Reilly found it curious that Rava would go to a game where such a promotion was taking place. “Gee, I wonder what a sue-happy lawyer from San Diego would be doing at an A’s-Twins game the very day that they were holding a women-only giveaway?” he wrote in his column.

We placed a call to Rava, but have yet to hear back. We’ll let you know when we do.

The judge who threw out the suit against the Angels, Jonathan Cannon of the Orange County Superior Court, wrote that the Unruh Act was invalid in that case because the promotion “did not involve an arbitrary, class-based distinction.” He also recognized that the giveaway was an effort to recognize Mother’s Day.

“The President's Mother's Day proclamation encouraged all ‘Americans to express their love, appreciation, and admiration to mothers for making a difference in the lives of their children, families, and communities.’ Defendant's May 8th game activities and give away did just that,” he wrote.

Full post as published by Law Blog - WSJ.com on June 12, 2009 (boomark / email).