Odd to read this article and find no reference to the long-established tribunals of the Australian Football League and (Australian) National Rugby League
League commissioners exist to insulate ownership from the contradiction between the inherently sociopathic nature of for-profit enterprise and the fact that the fans are real people with real senses of fairness and social demands, whatever those may be.
Plopping a judiciary on top of it all wouldn’t actually solve anything, it just further obscures the core farce of the situation.
Capitalism is the real problem here - that is to say, to whatever extent that it’s any worse than any other method of allocating resources, or of governing the business side of sports. We’re better off making our peace with that fact (or actively fighting it), not devising endless layers of bureaucracy to distract ourselves from it.
I just don’t have the patience anymore to let myself get all wrapped up in either side of this as a culture war issue. That’s why people get unreasonable about this stuff: they expect capitalism to give them the justice our justice system fails to, despite it being even less equipped to deliver that justice.
Why get mad about every single surface level instance of that conflict, when you understand that the individual actors in any instance are just playing designated roles in them?
I know nothing about basketball and have never heard to the person involved. It does seem reasonable however that large organizations might want to establish some sort of “court” procedure to deal this application of their own internal procedures, especially ones that could spill over into public.
I’m thinking about the case of the NYT editor that was bounced for letting Tom Cotton write an op ed. If senior management had had a “court” this could have gone to they probably would not have gotten stampeded in to dismissing the guy. Ditto the other poor schmuck ditched for trying to explain the use reference distinction of the N-word. I could see this as being useful, too, as a way for Florida universities to fend off ole “lightening eyes” Ric DeSantis when he comes after some hapless CRT warrior. 😊
Insane take. I can't believe you've induced me to leave a comment. Well done.
- The purpose of the Meta court isn't to provide consistency, it's to get people to stop yelling at Mark Zuckerberg.
- "Someone to yell at" is already a primary function of sports league commissioners.
- There's no reason to think that consistency is a positive value in entertainment. Is it a problem that the coyote slams into the tunnel that's been painted on the wall while the roadrunner passes through? No. Similarly, league fans want norm-setting punishments handed to benchwarmers, not MVPs on the eve of the finals.
- Most importantly/distastefully: the point of league sanctions is to protect the business. In the case of Morant, this is tangled up in the problem of policing the behavior of young men who have come into a lot of money; and managing the attitudes of a fan base with significant blocs that will withhold dollars if allowed to incubate racist stereotypes. Ask the NFL. This is why you encourage players to don formalwear pre-game and why you come down like a ton of bricks on gun offenses. The process is inextricably mediated by sports and celebrity journalism--which is unpredictable. A supple approach is required. Players have lawyers and a union, but mostly they have big compensation tied to contracts with morality clauses. This is the deal, it's how the money gets made, and it would be nuts to create an inflexible bureaucracy solely for the sake of principle.
It's way more likely that a Basketball Court would have bad biases than the NBA. Former players, former refs, even just people involved with basketball for a long time, have an interest in shaping how the game is played - towards the way they like it. Can you imagine the bias that would have arisen as the 3pt boom happened from the old farts that would have been on the Court? The NBA itself is the only body that cares about growing the game, which as the authors point out, fairness is crucial to. Leaving decision-making power up to people who aren't interested in growing the NBA would be bad for the NBA.
Isn't this sorta what the Court of Arbitration for Sport does? I guess Americans don't want international bodies of any kind, but there's definitely a precedent, albeit at a much higher, multi-sport level.
In terms of transparency, the NHL's Department of Player Safety started doing detailed explainers for its suspensions, and while they were controversial I think they were pretty good for fans.
Well yeah, a supermajority of owners is what it takes in real life for the commissioner. (And in practicality, it almost always needs to be unanimous.)
It's also why the owners love it when fans boo the hell out of commissioners in public settings. They pay them very well to divert the negative press away from themselves.
"Chief Justice John Roberts even referenced baseball umpires during his confirmation hearing to the Supreme Court as an analogy to judging."
This example undermines your position. Roberts was gleefully, obviously lying under oath. That moment cemented my post Bush-v-Gore sense that the SC had no legitimacy at all. Of the many instances of Robert's whole-cloth invention of "rules" to support reactionary ends, I'd cite striking down the Medicaid provision of the ACA as the most overt, but take your pick.
Way ahead of you. For me it was during Clarence Thomas's hearings when he said he'd never discussed nor had an opinion on the abortion question. I didn't blame him -- I blamed the idiocy of the public hearing process where we beg Court nominees to lie to our faces. Can we just abolish these wretched public spectacles and just to the final vote?
I think my disagreement stems from this. These questions aren't "complicated". Creating a new independent body to resolve conflict would be complicated. The current system is quite simple. The owners own the league and employ a commissioner to act in their best interests. In the Ja Morant case, however long the suspension ended up being: 10 games, 25 games, the entire season ... the only answer is that length was in the best interest of the owners.
… the more so as the dynamics of these tribunals (including the extra fan engagement) address earlier comments
Odd to read this article and find no reference to the long-established tribunals of the Australian Football League and (Australian) National Rugby League
I choose which sports to watch solely on institutional bureaucracy.
This "Basketball Court" (clever name) is really an amazing solution! Now all we need to do is to figure out what problem it is a solution to.
No offense to the law professors authoring this piece, but this really does carry a strong whiff of "I have a hammer so all I see are nails."
League commissioners exist to insulate ownership from the contradiction between the inherently sociopathic nature of for-profit enterprise and the fact that the fans are real people with real senses of fairness and social demands, whatever those may be.
Plopping a judiciary on top of it all wouldn’t actually solve anything, it just further obscures the core farce of the situation.
Capitalism is the real problem here - that is to say, to whatever extent that it’s any worse than any other method of allocating resources, or of governing the business side of sports. We’re better off making our peace with that fact (or actively fighting it), not devising endless layers of bureaucracy to distract ourselves from it.
This is the rare "Capitalism is the real problem" take that is actually reasonable. 😂
I just don’t have the patience anymore to let myself get all wrapped up in either side of this as a culture war issue. That’s why people get unreasonable about this stuff: they expect capitalism to give them the justice our justice system fails to, despite it being even less equipped to deliver that justice.
Why get mad about every single surface level instance of that conflict, when you understand that the individual actors in any instance are just playing designated roles in them?
I know nothing about basketball and have never heard to the person involved. It does seem reasonable however that large organizations might want to establish some sort of “court” procedure to deal this application of their own internal procedures, especially ones that could spill over into public.
I’m thinking about the case of the NYT editor that was bounced for letting Tom Cotton write an op ed. If senior management had had a “court” this could have gone to they probably would not have gotten stampeded in to dismissing the guy. Ditto the other poor schmuck ditched for trying to explain the use reference distinction of the N-word. I could see this as being useful, too, as a way for Florida universities to fend off ole “lightening eyes” Ric DeSantis when he comes after some hapless CRT warrior. 😊
Insane take. I can't believe you've induced me to leave a comment. Well done.
- The purpose of the Meta court isn't to provide consistency, it's to get people to stop yelling at Mark Zuckerberg.
- "Someone to yell at" is already a primary function of sports league commissioners.
- There's no reason to think that consistency is a positive value in entertainment. Is it a problem that the coyote slams into the tunnel that's been painted on the wall while the roadrunner passes through? No. Similarly, league fans want norm-setting punishments handed to benchwarmers, not MVPs on the eve of the finals.
- Most importantly/distastefully: the point of league sanctions is to protect the business. In the case of Morant, this is tangled up in the problem of policing the behavior of young men who have come into a lot of money; and managing the attitudes of a fan base with significant blocs that will withhold dollars if allowed to incubate racist stereotypes. Ask the NFL. This is why you encourage players to don formalwear pre-game and why you come down like a ton of bricks on gun offenses. The process is inextricably mediated by sports and celebrity journalism--which is unpredictable. A supple approach is required. Players have lawyers and a union, but mostly they have big compensation tied to contracts with morality clauses. This is the deal, it's how the money gets made, and it would be nuts to create an inflexible bureaucracy solely for the sake of principle.
It's way more likely that a Basketball Court would have bad biases than the NBA. Former players, former refs, even just people involved with basketball for a long time, have an interest in shaping how the game is played - towards the way they like it. Can you imagine the bias that would have arisen as the 3pt boom happened from the old farts that would have been on the Court? The NBA itself is the only body that cares about growing the game, which as the authors point out, fairness is crucial to. Leaving decision-making power up to people who aren't interested in growing the NBA would be bad for the NBA.
Isn't this sorta what the Court of Arbitration for Sport does? I guess Americans don't want international bodies of any kind, but there's definitely a precedent, albeit at a much higher, multi-sport level.
In terms of transparency, the NHL's Department of Player Safety started doing detailed explainers for its suspensions, and while they were controversial I think they were pretty good for fans.
This proposal needs an impeachment mechanism
People won't like who's actually in charge of "impeaching" a commissioner in real life.
Not the commissioner, the court. Presumably a supermajority of the owners. There has to be some way to remove someone for gross misconduct.
Well yeah, a supermajority of owners is what it takes in real life for the commissioner. (And in practicality, it almost always needs to be unanimous.)
It's also why the owners love it when fans boo the hell out of commissioners in public settings. They pay them very well to divert the negative press away from themselves.
"Chief Justice John Roberts even referenced baseball umpires during his confirmation hearing to the Supreme Court as an analogy to judging."
This example undermines your position. Roberts was gleefully, obviously lying under oath. That moment cemented my post Bush-v-Gore sense that the SC had no legitimacy at all. Of the many instances of Robert's whole-cloth invention of "rules" to support reactionary ends, I'd cite striking down the Medicaid provision of the ACA as the most overt, but take your pick.
Way ahead of you. For me it was during Clarence Thomas's hearings when he said he'd never discussed nor had an opinion on the abortion question. I didn't blame him -- I blamed the idiocy of the public hearing process where we beg Court nominees to lie to our faces. Can we just abolish these wretched public spectacles and just to the final vote?
AND at the commissioner's sole discretion the basketball court should be able to refer one case a year to the actual US Supreme Court.
The world needs less lawyers.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uG3uea-Hvy4
This can't be a serious idea. It's got to be a trollish allegory designed to elicit thoughts about SCOTUS and the role of the judiciary generally.
<resolving complicated questions>
I think my disagreement stems from this. These questions aren't "complicated". Creating a new independent body to resolve conflict would be complicated. The current system is quite simple. The owners own the league and employ a commissioner to act in their best interests. In the Ja Morant case, however long the suspension ended up being: 10 games, 25 games, the entire season ... the only answer is that length was in the best interest of the owners.
So, the proposal is that Mark Cuban should have taken whoever was to decide on Luka's fine on a trip with his private plane before the decision?