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Sports Law: Legal Issues and the NFL-CBA Negotiations

By Andis Kaulins

Law Professor Gabriel A. Feldman, Director of the Tulane Sports Law Program, has an article at the Huffington Post titled NFL Lockout: The Legal Issues Behind the NFL-CBA Negotiations.

What fascinates this observer about the entire field of "amateur" (tongue-in-cheek term) and professional sports is the special niche that the legal system in America has -- in our opinion, erroneously -- carved out for sports, which, no matter how attracted one may be to sports, are still essentially business operations at their core. That is why there are talks about a possible NFL lockout upcoming, which has nothing to do with sports but a lot do with business.

We really think that the courts need to review their holdings in this area of law and to reconsider the obvious state of affairs that professional sports leagues serve as institutions of "monopoly" rights, that exercise those rights with all the negative aspects that attend to them.

We think that all players in sports should have full freedom of contract, that things like the NFL draft are monopolistic per se, violating all the basic principles of antitrust law, and that salary caps, if instituted by anyone, should be passed by legislatures for ALL professions, eliminating the salary and gouging practices -- outright theft in many cases -- which characterize executive compensation in modern corporations.

Why salary caps only for professional athletes in monopolistic sports leagues?

Full post as published by LawPundit on February 10, 2011 (boomark / email).