Athletes Behaving Badly

Did Michael Vick get off easy when he was reinstated by the NFL?  Or would the League overstep its proper role in imposing further punishment on an athlete who has already paid his proverbial debt to society?  Variations on these questions arise every time a famous professional athlete breaks the law — an all-too-common occurence, it seems.  

Janie Kim and Matt Parlow make a thoughtful contribution to the debate with a new paper on SSRN entitled “Off-Court Misbehavior: Sports Leagues and Private Punishment.”  Here is the abstract:

This Essay examines how professional sports leagues address (apparently increasing) criminal activity by players off of the field or court. It analyzes the power of professional sports leagues and, in particular, the commissioners of those leagues, to discipline wayward athletes. Such discipline is often met with great controversy — from players’ unions and commentators alike — especially when a commissioner invokes the “in the best interest of the sport” clause of the professional sports league’s constitution and bylaws. The Essay then contextualizes such league discipline in criminal punishment theory — juxtaposing punishment norms in public law with incentives and rationales for discipline in professional sports — and analyzes the legal and cultural limitations to this approach.

As Kim and Parlow point out, one of the troubling aspects of league-administered punishment for off-court misconduct is that the procedures and standards seem so informal and ad hoc compared with those of the criminal justice system.  This raises legitimacy problems for league punishment — all the more so when the league itself is perceived to have unclean hands (see, e.g., MLB and steroids).

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The Balancing Act

RabideauxWhen discussing my participation as a law student blogger with Professor Jessica Slavin, she suggested readers might find the variety of responsibilities and challenges a part-time student faces interesting.  I balked at the idea of writing about my own attempt at work-life-school  balance.  For starters, it’s been done before.   Further, I want to avoid portraying my burden as heavier than those around me, as everyone is busy and dealing with pressures of their own.  The lawyers, law professors and law students who read this blog are all active people pulled in different directions and I didn’t suspect they would have much sympathy for the schedule I keep.

Then it dawned on me that the challenge of work-life balance is probably one of the few things all the readers of this blog have in common.  Full-time students have different pressures than part-time students, litigators face different challenges than estate planning attorneys, who are all under different professional pressures than Law School faculty or administrators.  However, we all know what it is like be put in a position to prioritize between professional and family or personal obligations.

Additionally, the birth of my son, Callan, in June brought new weight to the “life” side of the balancing act and makes the topic of work-life-school balance particularly timely and relevant for me.  I’ve always known time to be precious, but the stakes are indeed higher with a child in the house.  Perhaps it is my Catholic guilt, but the weeknights in the classroom or on the road for work, and the all-weekend study sessions now feel a bit like time I’ve stolen from my family.

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Harry Potter and the Unauthorized Sequel

Cover of Harry Potter and the Philosopher's StoneI don’t mean to clog up our blog with a debate over copyright law, but Gordon’s contribution to the debate Ed and I were having on derivative works is fantastic, and I’d like to do it justice with a long-ish reply. I’m familiar with Looking Backward, having read it in grad school, but I was not familiar with all of the spin-off literature that resulted. Certainly it seems like the debate among rival sequel authors was a good thing that probably decreased Bellamy’s incentives or ability to profit from his work not at all.

But Bellamy’s case is also an atypical case. As I said, I’ve read Looking Backward, and the actual fiction in it seems almost beside the point; even more than most science fiction, it’s really a political tract in novel’s clothing. That makes it more prone to criticism and commentary in the form of follow-on works than most other novels would be. In other words, I think cases like Looking Backward should be handled by an exception to the general rule against unauthorized sequels (fair use), not by abolishing the general rule altogether.

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