Resources
- Antitrust, Regulation, and the “New” Rules of Sports Telecasts - Hastings Law JournalThis Article presents a novel quantitative analysis of sports league antitrust jurisprudence to counter cries for increased regulatory scrutiny of these joint ventures. The results demonstrate that antitrust is not only capable of policing joint ventures, but that the Supreme Court revitalized such review in American Needle v. NFL.
- The Baseball Trust: A History of Baseball’s Antitrust Exemption - Mid-American Studies AssociationDuring the 1960s, with the creation of the Super Bowl and the merger of the National Football and American Football League, football clearly surpassed the “national pastime” of baseball as the country’s most popular and profitable professional sport. However, despite the changes to professional sports brought about by jet travel and ubiquitous media coverage, baseball has the unique distinction of exemption from federal antitrust laws. Stuart Banner, a law professor from the University of California, Los Angeles, has traced the long and, sometime, tortured paths of legislation and court decisions that date back to the very beginnings of professional sports in the 19th century and the era of trust busting.
- Challenge to MLB’s antitrust exemption nears juncture: chase payday or history? - The Athletic*Requires paid subscription.
- The Origin of the Baseball Antitrust Exemption: Federal Baseball Club of Baltimore, Inc. v. National League of Professional Baseball Clubs - Journal of Supreme Court HistoryOf all the Court's antitrust cases, the Federal Baseball case may well be the most widely known, but what most people know about the case is not quite accurate. The case is generally known as having held that baseball has an “antitrust exemption.” And critics of the decision—and they are legion—sometimes suggest that the decision was attributable to either (1) the Justices' affection for baseball and a desire to bend the rules to promote its well-being or (2) the Justices' woeful ignorance about what professional baseball had become by 1922. In truth, as we shall see, Justice Holmes' unanimous opinion for the Court represented a fairly orthodox application of then-prevalent constitutional doctrine.
- Why Baseball's Antitrust Exemption Still Survives - Marquette Sports Law ReviewAlthough the Curt Flood Act' technically limits professional baseball's antitrust immunity, the statute actually reconfirms the sport's seventy-five year old exemption to the federal antitrust laws. By abrogating only that part of the immunity that applies to labor relations at the major
league level, the statute implicitly (and explicitly) leaves intact the remainder of the immunity. The remarkable feature of the Flood Act is
not what it did, but what it did not do.
Baseball on Trial by Call Number: ELECTRONIC BOOKISBN: 9780252095993Publication Date: 2014The controversial 1922 Federal Baseball Supreme Court ruling held that the "business of base ball" was not subject to the Sherman Antitrust Act because it did not constitute interstate commerce. In Baseball on Trial, legal scholar Nathaniel Grow defies conventional wisdom to explain why the unanimous Supreme Court opinion authored by Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, which gave rise to Major League Baseball's exemption from antitrust law, was correct given the circumstances of the time.
The Baseball Trust by Call Number: ELECTRONIC BOOKPublication Date: 2013The impact of antitrust law on sports is in the news all the time, especially when there is labor conflict between players and owners, or when a team wants to move to a new city. And if the majority of Americans have only the vaguest sense of what antitrust law is, most know one thing about it-that baseball is exempt. In The Baseball Trust, legal historian Stuart Banner illuminates the series of court rulings that resulted in one of the most curious features of our legal system-baseball's exemption from antitrust law. A
The Big Leagues Go to Washington by Call Number: ELECTRONIC BOOKPublication Date: 2015Between 1951 and 1989, Congress held a series of hearings to investigate the antitrust aspects of professional sports leagues. Among the concerns: ownership control of players, restrictions on new franchises, territorial protection, and other cartel-like behaviors. In The Big Leagues Go to Washington, David Surdam chronicles the key issues that arose during the hearings and the ways opposing sides used economic data and theory to define what was right, what was feasible, and what was advantageous to one party or another.
