Legal Commentary

As long as I'm on a sports theme, the Sports Illustrated curse reared its head this week, I think, with a Boston connection in both cases.  Just to give it an academic spin (for a law professor blog), the SI curse is probably one of the best known examples of the behavioral psychology phenomenon known as the availability heuristic (conclusion based on the availability, not the correctness, of the data).  For as long as I can remember, so we are talking in excess of forty years (since I had an SI subscription as a teenager in the Sixties), being on the cover of the magazine is supposed to place a curse on the person or team so highlighted.

Because I have been assiduously grading for the past several days (or coming up with reasons not to be grading), I did not get to this week's Sports Illustrated until this morning.  The cover story was about whether Shaquille O'Neal could help deliver a championship to LeBron James and the long benighted Cleveland Cavaliers.  Alas, by the time I read the magazine, the Celtics had already eliminated the Cavs.  Inside the magazine was a story about Miroslav Satan, a player on the Boston Bruins, appropriate because at the time the story was written, the Bruins had a 3-0 lead on the Philadelphia Flyers in a best of seven series.  Again, alas, the Flyers came back to eliminate the Bruins last night.