My Twitter bio states that my ambition is to be a professor of “baseball law”. I meant this to be tongue in cheek – although I’ve often thought that the principles of statutory interpretation could be taught using MLB’s Official Rules. I could come close to this ambition though: I recently learned that at least thirteen US law schools have offered a “Baseball and the Law” course. Now such courses have a definitive casebook in the form of Louis Schiff and Robert Jarvis’ Baseball and the Law: Cases and Materials (Durham NC: Carolina Academic Press, 2016).
The casebook’s coverage is comprehensive. Cases are organized from baseball’s point of view, rather than traditional categories of legal subject areas. There are chapters on Commissioners, Teams, Stadiums, Players, Fans and Amateurs. I think this is a helpful approach: generally speaking, outside the walls of law schools and law firms, clients’ legal problems are not organized into legal categories, and the sooner students realize this, the better.
The casebook is understandably US-focused (but see Davidson v Toronto Blue Jays, dealing with the rights of ticket-holders), and many of the cases deal with US-specific legal questions, such as the application of anti-trust legislation and the level of scrutiny in sex discrimination claims. I wondered whether women would be missing entirely from such a casebook, but this isn’t true of Baseball and the Law and it feels like the authors made a deliberate effort to address this concern. In addition to a number of cases dealing with sex discrimination (including Ludtke v Kuhn striking down MLB’s ban on women reporters in locker rooms), the Notes discuss MLB’s domestic violence policy and women’s history and future in professional baseball as players and umpires; a number of women are cited in the Notes, particularly in the Introduction; and there are photos of Justice Sonia Sotomayor (“the woman who saved baseball” and the 1995 season) throwing out the first pitch at a Yankees game and of Little League World Series pitching phenom Mo’ne Davis.
One thing that becomes apparent reading the cases in Baseball and the Law is that baseball has always been a business: in an 1885 decision, Judge Thayer describes baseball as “very lucrative”. Another realization is that a significant number of judges are huge baseball fans. The most famous example is Justice Blackmun’s list of greatest players in Flood v Kuhn. See also Judge Bauer in Selig v United State (who started each part of the judgement with a quote about baseball) and Judge Black in Niemiec v Seattle Rainier Baseball Club, Inc (“Professional baseball is a great American institution.”). In a number of instances, this works in favour of professional baseball’s powers that be, such as baseball’s anti-trust exemption, and the “baseball rule” precluding liability for injuries caused by hazards inherent in watching a live baseball game – which, by the way, do not include hot-dog hurling mascots (see Coomer v Kansas City Royals Baseball Corporation). But not in every case, as when Steinbrenner tried to play the Yankees’ home opening series in Denver (“No money damages can measure or assuage this kind of harm.”). For anyone interested in how judges’ personal preferences help shape the law, the casebook is a fascinating study.
It’s clear that the law has done a lot for baseball. It’s less clear what baseball has done for the law. Given the breadth of subject areas covered – from contract interpretation to intellectual property to labour rights to tort liability – I would have liked more in the Notes following each case explaining how the cases have shaped the law beyond baseball. For the law professor or law student as baseball fan, however, the Notes are a goldmine of baseball facts and lore, and, more importantly, help to place the cases in their historical and social context. This brings the cases to life and made me want to read the next case – which is exactly what law professors want their students to do, and should be the ultimate goal of any law school casebook.
