Legal News

Law Blog Obituaries: John Phillips and Thomas Roberts

By Dan Slater

The Kung Fu Judge: A real estate prospector, a movie theater owner, a filmmaker and a would-be politician. According to this NYT obituary, that was John Phillips (pictured), a retired civil court judge in Brooklyn who died on Saturday at 83. He became known simply as the kung fu judge for having earned the rank of 10th-degree black belt. How’s that for order in the court!?

In 1989, when Judge Phillips (Wilberforce University, Wilberforce Law School) drew the ire of black politicians for backing Rudy Giuliani over David Dinkins in NYC’s mayoral race, he reasoned that black voters should support Giuliani because of his crime-fighting experience. “I’m 6 feet 1. I can kill you with my hands faster than you can believe, and I carry a gun. But I’m scared to walk the streets at night. How do you think black women feel?”

Judge Phillips — who in 2001 tried to challenge Charles Hynes in the race for Brooklyn DA, but was eventually declared mentally incompetent — never married but for many years had a companion, Elizabeth Pickett, who died earlier. He had no children.

The Players’ Arbitrator: Thomas T. Roberts, a prominent arbitrator best known for his mid-1980s ruling that major league baseball club owners had improperly colluded to prevent free-agent players from obtaining richer contracts, died last Wedenesday. He was 84.

Roberts (Loyola University, Loyola Law School) was fired twice by Major League Baseball management for issuing rulings in favor of the players. In 1986, he ruled that teams could not negotiate drug-testing clauses with players individually; they had to deal with the players union under the collective bargaining agreement.

After being reinstated, Roberts issued his most famous ruling in the baseball case widely-known as the “collusion case” in which he found that, following the 1985 season, no teams had sought to sign free agents unless their old clubs had lost interest in them. He termed that “a strong indication of concerted action,” something prohibited by baseball’s collective bargaining agreement. Roberts was fired again by management. But in 1990 his ruling was vindicated when the owners agreed to pay affected players $280 million plus interest to settle the collusion cases.

Full post as published by Law Blog - WSJ.com on February 19, 2008 (boomark / email).