NBA Economics and the Next Collective Bargaining Agreement

The Lebron James feeding frenzy notwithstanding, these are troubled times for the National Basketball Association.  The league is already losing hundreds of millions of dollars per year, and the continued sluggishness of the natonal economy does not bode well for an imminent turnaround in the league’s fortunes.  Perhaps some Greek-style austerity measures are in order.  The league’s collective bargaining agreement with the players’ union limits its flexibility, but the current CBA expires after next season, setting the stage for a potentially bitter confrontation over the division of a shrinking pie.

For anyone in need of a scorecard, Matt Parlow provides an engaging review of NBA economics and preview of the coming labor negotiations in a new paper on SSRN.  Entitled “The NBA and the Great Recession: Implications for the Upcoming Collective Bargaining Agreement Renegotiation,” the paper will be published in the DePaul Journal of Sports Law and Contemporary Problems.  The abstract appears after the jump. 

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Best of the Blogs

Time for a new feature here at the Marquette University Faculty Blog.  From time to time the editors of the blog will share links to some of the more interesting recent law-related posts appearing on the blogosphere.  I will get things started.

Over at Scotusblog, Tom Goldstein has an excellent round up of the recently concluded Supreme Court term.  It is commonplace to read broad generalizations about the Roberts Court in the media lately, for example during the hearings on the nomination of Elena Kagan.  Is this an activist Court, rejecting precedent and beholden to corporate interests?  Or has the Court found its moorings once again after years of drifting along according to the whims of Justice Kennedy?  Tom takes a cold hard look at the evidence, and his conclusions may surprise you.  You can read his post here.

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Learning from Sports Law

Some problems that seem to demand coordinated international solutions, like global warming and biopiracy, languish for years without effective responses by the international community.  Yet, when the international community set out to address the problem of doping in sports in the late 1990’s, a robust international regulatory system was set up in relatively short order.  Does the anti-doping experience have broader lessons for global law-making?  Matt Mitten and Hayden Opie think it might.

In a new paper on SSRN, Matt and Hayden argue that “the evolving law of sports is having and will continue to have a significant influence on, and implications for, the development of broader international and national laws.”  They examine the anti-doping movement and other sports-law case studies that they believe should be better appreciated by scholars outside the sports-law field for their broader relevance. 

Entitled “‘Sports Law’: Implications for the Development of International, Comparative, and National Law and Global Dispute Resolution,” the paper will appear in the Tulane Law Review.  The abstract appears after the jump. 

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