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The Baseball Research Journal issue on Baseball and the Law

By Rick Karcher, Michael McCann, Geoffrey Rapp, Greg Skidmore, and Howard Wasserman

While the American Needle v. NFL oral argument will garner most of the attention today, I thought that some might be interested to know that the Society for American Baseball Research has released the latest issue of its Baseball Research Journal containing a special section discussing baseball and the law. According to the Journal's website, the highlights of the issue include:

• Samuel A. Alito, reviewing the Federal League case that was decided by the Supreme Court in 1922, concludes that the unanimous opinion written by Oliver Wendell Holmes, though often criticized and even derided, was closely argued and cogent.

• Roger I. Abrams analyzes the decision by arbitrator Peter Seitz in the groundbreaking Messersmith arbitration case of 1975. Mark Armour looks at the effort of two American League umpires to unionize in the 1960s.

• The late Gene Carney, in a masterful narration of events as revealed through documents recently purchased by the Chicago History Museum, takes his readers into the world of the private detectives hired by White Sox owner Charles Comiskey in the wake of the Black Sox scandal of 1919.

• Ross Davies contributes his own detective work, as it were, that leads to a surprising conclusion about the composition of Harry Blackmun?s opinion in the Flood case of 1972. In his portrait of William R. Day, arguably the most knowledgeable fan in the history of Supreme Court justices, Davies shows us baseball notes that justices exchanged as they sat hearing cases on the bench. While researching the baseball background of Supreme Court justices, Davies discovers that the story that William Howard Taft played baseball at Yale is, in fact, groundless.

For those interested in acquiring a copy of the journal, you can order it here.

Full post as published by Sports Law Blog on January 13, 2010 (boomark / email).