Sports as Legal Systems: A Comparative Investigation of Law

This is a 3-unit course that investigates sports as legal systems. Law is a highly organized
normative system. Organized sports are close cousins to ordinary legal systems. They use formally 
promulgated rules, enforced by impartial adjudicators, to regulate many forms of behavior in order to 
achieve a complex array of ends. As a result, organized sports provide a valuable and under-studied 
subject matter for legal theorists and law students. 

This course examines sports as legal systems in their own right. It is not a course in the law of sports, 
i.e., a course about how the law regulates sports. Instead, it treats sports as normative systems parallel 
to legal systems and uses them as a comparative way of studying many of the features of legal 
systems that are studied by legal theory and legal philosophy. The course thus provides an unusual 
and accessible introduction to many aspects of legal theory and legal philosophy. 

Topics to be addressed include: What are sports, and what is their relationship to games? (The IOC 
has determined that bridge and chess are sports. Is this correct? Does it matter?) What values or 
purposes do sports serve, and how should tradeoffs among these values be evaluated? 
What form should the rules of sports take? (Should sports rules contain “mens rea” terms such as 
knowledge or intent, or should they impose strict liability? Should they be more “rule-like” or more 
“standard-like”? When should the adage “no harm, no foul” apply?) How much discretion do and 
should officials have? (Chief Justice Roberts said that “judges are like umpires.” Is this true? In what 
ways? What are the implications for umpiring? Or for judging?) Should on-field decisions be 
appealable and, if so, what should the procedures and standards of appellate review be? (For 
example, should sports use a highly demanding standard such as “indisputable visual evidence”?) 
What is cheating? (Did the badminton players at the London Olympics who tried to lose “cheat”? Do 
baseball players cheat when they falsely claim to be hit by a pitch? Are all tactical rule violations 
cheating? If not, which are and which aren’t?) What should the rules of eligibility be? (What if 
anything justifies segregation of men and women in athletic competitions? Should amputees using 
prosthetic limbs be allowed to compete against non-disabled athletes?)

One advantage of the course is that it brings in many students who might otherwise not encounter the 
subject matter of legal philosophy, thus exposing them to topics in the foundations of law. 
Experience in other law schools where versions of the class have been taught shows that the course
tends to draw large enrollment. Another benefit of the class is that students who are knowledgeable 
about sports in general or about a particular sport have instant expertise that they can draw on in the 
classroom.