Overlawyered: Chronicling The High Cost Of Our Legal System

Posts Tagged ‘sports’

“Derek Boogaard’s Family Is Suing The NHL For Wrongful Death”

The family, now represented by Chicago’s Corboy & Demetrio, is refiling a suit dismissed earlier [Deadspin]:

According to The New York Times, the complaint alleges that the N.H.L., through the actions/inactions of the teams and team physicians charged with caring for Boogaard, breached a duty to Boogaard in failing to monitor his prescription drug use. The suit also alleges that the league’s substance abuse program violated its own rules when it failed to suspend or reprimand him for his several lapses, even in the face of multiple failed drug tests and his admissions that he occasionally purchased the drugs illegally.

P.S. In other sports-lawsuit news, “Vijay Singh sued the PGA Tour on Wednesday for exposing him to ‘public humiliation and ridicule’ during a 12-week investigation into his use of deer-antler spray that ended last week when the tour dropped its case against him.” [ESPN, auto-plays video]

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“NCAA sued over rule barring felons”

“A nonprofit group sued the NCAA on Wednesday over a new policy that bars felons from coaching NCAA-sanctioned events. The lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court in San Diego, claims that the new rule violates the Civil Rights Act and disproportionately affects minority coaches.” [ESPN, auto-plays video] The suit dovetails with the EEOC’s new crackdown on employer consideration of criminal records, which as James Bovard writes in the Wall Street Journal, seems calculated to raise the legal risks substantially for employers who put job applicants through criminal background checks: it denies the “business necessity” defense to employers even when a state’s law mandates the use of criminal checks, and requires most employers seeking to consider criminal records to enter a legal minefield of obligatory “individualized assessment” in which decisions can be second-guessed readily and expensively:

It is difficult to overstate the EEOC’s zealotry on this issue. The agency is demanding that one of [former EEOC general counsel Donald] Livingston’s clients — the Freeman Companies, a convention and corporate events planner — pay compensation to rejected job applicants who lied about their criminal records.

(& T. Andrew Perkins)

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Massive new mandate for schools to provide disabled sports

Don’t you wish we’d heard more about this before the election, and not just afterward?

Breaking new ground, the U.S. Education Department is telling schools they must include students with disabilities in sports programs or provide equal alternative options. The directive, reminiscent of the Title IX expansion of athletic opportunities for women, could bring sweeping changes to school budgets and locker rooms for years to come.

Schools would be required to make “reasonable modifications” for students with disabilities or create parallel athletic programs that have comparable standing as mainstream programs.

[AP/Yahoo, New York Times, Michael Petrilli/NR (“The Obama Administration Invents a Right to Wheelchair Basketball”)]

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Lance Armstrong as litigant

The disgraced cyclist, like quite a few celebrities (and non-celebrities), had filed defamation actions against persons over statements he had good reason to know were true. That’s not just a violation of his adversaries’ rights, but an inherently sanctionable use of the courts [Michael McCann/Sports Illustrated via Turkewitz; Emily Bazelon/Slate (“Armstrong ‘sued so many people that by his own admission he can’t remember their names'”)]

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“San Antonio Spurs sued by lawyer for resting top players”

A lawyer has filed an intended class action in Florida court against the San Antonio Spurs, saying it caused him “economic damage” as a ticket buyer for management of the visiting team to have sent top players home to rest amid four games in five days. “Some might argue that the Heat’s fans got their money’s worth. That’s because the team barely beat the undermanned Spurs that night 105-100. [Attorney Larry] McGuinness said that doesn’t mean a game with the Spurs’ top players couldn’t have been more exciting.” [ESPN, auto-plays video]

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Lawsuits snarl Ohio high school football playoffs

At least the lawyers are getting some exercise [Cleveland Plain Dealer via Adler]:

Thursday was one of the strangest days in Ohio high school football history. Not a single down was played and it ended in total confusion…. The Ohio Supreme Court might have the final word….

Edgewood Superintendent Joe Spiccia said the plan Thursday night was to create a conflicting court order, which it did. … [OHSAA spokesman Tim Stried] said neither game will be played until the case is resolved by another court because if either game took place, it would be violating one of the two court orders.

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Economic incentives and the Aqueduct horse deaths

In the New York Daily News, Lawrence Cunningham argues that skewed economic incentives — some of them advanced by the actions of federal prosecutors, who applied muscle in a tax-fraud settlement to press for the casino-ization of Aqueduct Race Track — contributed to the deaths of 21 racehorses, most of whom were entered in races with purses artificially inflated so as far to exceed their own economic worth. “Politicians and prosecutors should not direct business changes without understanding their significance. What’s happening to the horses at Aqueduct could have been prevented.”

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New Orleans Saints class action

“A New Orleans Saints fan named David Mancina has filed a putative class action against Roger Goodell and the NFL, alleging that Goodell and the league’s suspension of Saints players entitles Mancina and other Saints fans to damages from (I am not making this up) ‘the diminishment in the value of their tickets; their personal emotional reaction to the unwarranted penalties inflicted on their beloved team, players, coaches, and executives; and the deliberate reduction of the competitive capability of the Saints due to the selective gutting of the critical components needed to justify the loyalty of Plaintiff and the class.'” [Howard Wasserman, Prawfs, who does not think much of the suit, headlining it “Today in Sanctionable Lawsuits”]

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