I used to say to anyone who cared, “Don’t plan anything; just answer the phone,” because every turn in my life has come with a telephone call. It’s bad advice now because nobody uses the telephone.
Nobody was really looking deeply, trying to dig into the social and cultural implication of sports, which have a tremendous array. In the law, it’s about antitrust policy; it’s about labor policy, health policy, media policy. Sports is so dominant.
We [Sports and Society] were not part of any entity within the university. Then Dennis Di Lorenzo became the head of [the School of Professional Studies], and for the first time someone in this building said, “This is real.”
He decided to split sports off from hospitality and tourism and said, “Why don’t you run it?” I said, “If I run it, I bring Sports and Society inside what we now call the Tisch Institute.”
Why does an 80-year-old man who has no background in sports other than he can sit in the stadium and watch, why does he do this after 55 years as an academic absolutely refusing to become a dean or administrator? I had no clear answer other than I love sports, I love the people connected with this industry, I believe in Dennis.
I do believe sports has become so serious a part of our environment that it deserves serious study and a serious academic program. This melds the two.
I think the judges now sort of believe or are coming to believe … that it’s a huge business now with arms and legs and feet and toes and it’s everywhere. We’ve got to think about it.
Now, I think the sports industry has to stand and defend like any other litigant. Their cover is blown. I don’t mean that in any negative sense, just an awareness.
There’s this ancient rule that an equity court will not interfere in the internal management of a private association, but I suspect there are a lot of judges out there saying, “Well, you’re not quite a private association, Major League Baseball or NFL. You’re closer to a utility. You have the ability to impact important policies, particularly in the health area.”
I think there’s probably a recognition that the college athletes have rights. It’s not clear to me, although O’Bannon says yes, and instinctively you sort of feel, “Yes, there are personality rights.” But there are some technical issues like federal pre-emption by the copyright act — whether you can have intellectual property in that face or the way he’s dressed.
I’m an old fogey when it comes to copyright. Copyright is not about ideas. It’s not really about processes or game rules or anything like that. There’s a constant pressure in judges freeing up the market. At least historically there’s always been that, so I’m not sure the last word has been written.
Although the British have lost their empire, I don’t think that’s attributable to the fact that there’s legalized gambling. I think the more you look at it and see that the foundations of the republic will not crumble … that there’s an enormous economic pot there that could be taxed, I think it’s inevitable.
You have this constant confrontation between the health of the sport and the privacy of a player. You see it in the debates about what the government is doing in terms of surveillance, etc., etc. That’s a wavy line. How that balance is struck changes every couple of years.
I think we’ve moved so far along in drug testing that it’s clearly an acceptable collective-bargaining issue, and I think the players are less likely to stonewall it than in the past.
I stumbled into law school for want of anything else to do. In my half-century of teaching, I would say close to half the law students I encountered really can’t tell you why they went to law school.
I believe that law school is an opening education, because if it does give you that mental agility and that sort of 360-degree field of vision, you can apply that anywhere, which again is why CEOs very often are lawyers — not simply in sports, but in major industries.
There’s great debate in education, and particularly in legal education, as to whether to ban the computer from the classroom. Some of my colleagues, Elizabeth Warren, a dear friend, she banned them. … Seems anti-intellectual, but it’s nice to see faces instead of flaps.
A lot of people think I’m Kingsfield from “The Paper Chase.” I’m not, but my teaching methods are in that vein.
I say to my first-year class, very first hour, I say, “You’re going into a profession in which the words ‘I’m not prepared’ are unacceptable. Unacceptable to a judge, unacceptable to a senior partner, unacceptable to a negotiating adversary.”
When I go and do an appellate argument, especially in front of the Supreme Court, every insecurity of my youth reappears. The first time I argued in the Supreme Court, the way it works, you’ve got to sit in the court until your argument is called. I was numb from the waist down.
