On February 27, 2024, the Section’s Trade, Sports & Professional Associations Committee co-sponsored, along with New York University’s Antitrust and Competition Law Society, a program entitled, “Game On: Navigating the Crossroad of Antitrust & Sport Law”. The program covered several of the major developments in antitrust and sports law since the U.S. Supreme Court’s landmark decision in NCAA v. Alston, which upheld the judgment that the NCAA and its eleven major conferences violated the antitrust laws by capping the value of athletic scholarships.
Panel members Johanna Rae Hudgens (Winston & Strawn LLP) and Marc Edelman (Baruch College, CUNY) described the landscape of post-Alston cases, including challenges to the NCAA’s Transfer Eligibility Rule in Ohio v. NCAA (N.D.W.V.) and NIL policies in State of TN v. NCAA (E.D. Tenn.), and addressed the open issue of whether and when preserving “amateurism” remained a procompetitive justification for restrictions on student-athlete compensation.
In the second half of the program, Josh Snyder (Boni, Zack & Snyder LLC) shifted the discussion to professional sports and, specifically, the Ninth Circuit’s opinion in the NFL Sunday Ticket Litigation. Mr. Snyder ran through a host of the significant antitrust issues resolved by the appellate court in the Sunday Ticket case and the Ninth Circuit’s observation (intuitive, perhaps, to much of the U.S. population) that “professional football games have no substitutes.” The TSPA program, which is part of the ABA’s “Why Antitrust?” series, was moderated by Paul Saint-Antoine (Faegre Drinker Biddle & Reath LLP).
The content of this program does not meet requirements for continuing legal education (CLE) accreditation. You will not receive CLE credit for participating.
