A Brief History of Professional Team Sports

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
David George Surdam
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
National Football League ◽  
Team Sports ◽  
Court Case ◽  
Free Agency ◽  
Congressional Hearings ◽  
Professional Team Sports ◽  
Supreme Court Case ◽  
History Of ◽  
National League

This chapter traces the history of professional team sports in order to place the issues covered in the Congressional hearings in the proper context. It first considers the rise of baseball as America's national pastime and Major League Baseball (MLB)'s decision to maintain two separate leagues, the American League and the National League. It then discusses the dispute between MLB and the rival Federal League, along with the emergence of other sports that achieved Big League status, namely, football and basketball. It also examines the prosperity of the National Football League (NFL) and the National Basketball Association (NBA) as well as the appearance of new challengers to their dominance after World War II. Finally, it looks at the Flood v. Kuhn, a Supreme Court case that challenged baseball's reserve clause, along with the rise of free agency.

Professional Team Sports in the United States

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Steven A. Riess
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
National Football League ◽  
Team Sports ◽  
The United States ◽  
Employee Relations ◽  
Free Agency ◽  
Successful Operation ◽  
Sports Teams ◽  
Professional Team Sports ◽  
Set Up

Professional sports teams are athletic organizations comprising talented, expert players hired by club owners whose revenues originally derived from admission fees charged to spectators seeing games in enclosed ballparks or indoor arenas. Teams are usually members of a league that schedules a championship season, although independent teams also can arrange their own contests. The first professional baseball teams emerged in the east and Midwest in 1860s, most notably the all-salaried undefeated Cincinnati Red Stockings of 1869. The first league was the haphazardly organized National Association of Professional Base Ball Players (1871), supplanted five years later by the more profit-oriented National League (NL) that set up strict rules for franchise locations, financing, and management–employee relations (including a reserve clause in 1879, which bound players to their original employer), and barred African Americans after 1884. Once the NL prospered, rival major leagues also sprang up, notably the American Association in 1882 and the American League in 1901. Major League Baseball (MLB) became a model for the professionalization of football, basketball, and hockey, which all had short-lived professional leagues around the turn of the century. The National Football League and the National Hockey League of the 1920s were underfinanced regional operations, and their teams often went out of business, while the National Basketball Association was not even organized until 1949. Professional team sports gained considerable popularity after World War II. The leagues dealt with such problems as franchise relocations and nationwide expansion, conflicts with interlopers, limiting player salaries, and racial integration. The NFL became the most successful operation by securing rich national television contracts, supplanting baseball as the national pastime in the 1970s. All these leagues became lucrative investments. With the rise of “free agency,” professional team athletes became extremely well paid, currently averaging more than $2 million a year.

The Impact of Free Agency on Competitive Balance in North American Professional Team Sports Leagues

2006 ◽  
Vol 20 (3) ◽  
pp. 345-365 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joel Maxcy ◽  
Michael Mondello
Keyword(s):  
National Football League ◽  
Team Sports ◽  
National Hockey League ◽  
Competitive Balance ◽  
Free Agency ◽  
Free Agent ◽  
Professional Team Sports ◽  
Dependent Variables ◽  
Sports Leagues ◽  
The Impact

Free agency was reintroduced to professional team sport leagues in the 1970s. Sport enthusiasts expressed concern that competitive balance would diminish as star players congregated to large market cities. However, the economic invariance principle rejects this notion, indicating that balance should remain unchanged. This article empirically examines the effects of changes in free agent rules on competitive balance over time in the National Basketball Association (NBA), National Football League (NFL), and National Hockey League (NHL). Regression analysis using within-season and between-season measures of competitive balance as dependent variables provides mixed results. The NFL and NHL provide evidence that an aspect of competitive balance has improved, but results from the NBA indicate that balance has worsened since the introduction of free agency. We conclude that the ambiguous results suggest that the effects are not independent, but instead depend on the interaction of free agent rights with other labor market and league rules.

Professional Sports Teams Grapple with Radio and Television

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
David George Surdam
Keyword(s):  
National Football League ◽  
Team Sports ◽  
Professional Sports ◽  
Active Role ◽  
High School Football ◽  
Sports History ◽  
Sports Teams ◽  
Minor League ◽  
Professional Team Sports ◽  
History Of

This chapter examines professional team sports' history with radio and television. Congress played an active role in the marriage of sports and television by passing legislation concerning national television contracts and television blackout rules. Legislators denounced Major League Baseball (MLB) for broadcasting and telecasting their games into minor league territory as well as National Football League (NFL) owners for their blackouts of telecasts of home games. Legislators also worried about the effects of NFL telecasts on college and high school football games, although little evidence was presented regarding these effects. This chapter first considers the early history of television in sports before discussing the effects of televising home games upon attendance and gate receipts, the U.S. Department of Justice's antitrust suit against the NFL regarding its policy of blocking telecasts of home games, and the controversy surrounding the NFL's blackout policy. It also explores the issue of national television contracts and television revenue sharing.

Video as Text/Archive

2019 ◽  
pp. 778-797
Author(s):  
Bennett Capers
Keyword(s):  
Supreme Court ◽  
Court Case ◽  
The Supreme Court ◽  
Surveillance Cameras ◽  
American Law ◽  
Supreme Court Case ◽  
History Of ◽  
Constitutional Protections

This chapter focuses on a few issues related to video evidence and law, especially with respect to American law. The first issue is the history of the use of video evidence in court. The second issue involves constitutional protections regarding the state’s use of surveillance cameras. The chapter then turns to the Supreme Court case Scott v. Harris to raise concerns about the use of video evidence as not just proof but “truth.” These are of course just a sampling of the issues that the topic of video evidence could raise. The hope is that this chapter will spur further inquiry on the part of the reader.

Confiscation of property in Czechoslovakia in 1945—exclusion of German jurisdiction—Convention on the Settlement of Matters Arising out of the War and the Occupation—nationality in international law—neutrality of Liechtenstein in World War II

1999 ◽  
Vol 93 (1) ◽  
pp. 215-219
Author(s):  
Bernard H. Oxman ◽  
Bardo Fassbender
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Court Case ◽  
Constitutional Court ◽  
World War ◽  
Head Of State ◽  
Federal Constitutional ◽  
Supreme Court Case ◽  
German Constitutional Court ◽  
Civil Courts ◽  
German Federal Constitutional Court

Prince of Liechtenstein v. Federal Supreme Court. Case 2 BvR 1981/97. 36 Archiv des Volkerrechts 198 (1998).German Federal Constitutional Court (3d Chamber, 2d Senate), January 28, 1998.On January 28, 1998, a chamber of the German Constitutional Court decided that the Court would not deal with a constitutional complaint brought before it by Prince Hans-Adam II of Liechtenstein, Head of State of die Principality of Liechtenstein. In effect, the chamber thus upheld the decisions made by the civil courts rejecting the Prince's attempt to recover a family painting confiscated by Czechoslovakia and currently on loan to a German museum.

scholarly journals Diabolical survival in Death Valley: recent pupfish colonization, gene flow and genetic assimilation in the smallest species range on earth

2016 ◽  
Vol 283 (1823) ◽  
pp. 20152334 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christopher H. Martin ◽  
Jacob E. Crawford ◽  
Bruce J. Turner ◽  
Lee H. Simons
Keyword(s):  
Gene Flow ◽  
Demographic History ◽  
Genetic Assimilation ◽  
Death Valley ◽  
Court Case ◽  
Devils Hole ◽  
Supreme Court Case ◽  
History Of ◽  
New Perspective ◽  
Outstanding Question

One of the most endangered vertebrates, the Devils Hole pupfish Cyprinodon diabolis , survives in a nearly impossible environment: a narrow subterranean fissure in the hottest desert on earth, Death Valley. This species became a conservation icon after a landmark 1976 US Supreme Court case affirming federal groundwater rights to its unique habitat. However, one outstanding question about this species remains unresolved: how long has diabolis persisted in this hellish environment? We used next-generation sequencing of over 13 000 loci to infer the demographic history of pupfishes in Death Valley. Instead of relicts isolated 2–3 Myr ago throughout repeated flooding of the entire region by inland seas as currently believed, we present evidence for frequent gene flow among Death Valley pupfish species and divergence after the most recent flooding 13 kyr ago. We estimate that Devils Hole was colonized by pupfish between 105 and 830 years ago, followed by genetic assimilation of pelvic fin loss and recent gene flow into neighbouring spring systems. Our results provide a new perspective on an iconic endangered species using the latest population genomic methods and support an emerging consensus that timescales for speciation are overestimated in many groups of rapidly evolving species.

Player Rights 1951 and 1957

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
David George Surdam
Keyword(s):  
Team Sports ◽  
Professional Sports ◽  
Congressional Hearings ◽  
Professional Team Sports ◽  
Sports Leagues ◽  
Professional Sports Leagues

This chapter examines one of the most contentious issues in professional sports leagues that were tackled at the Congressional hearings in 1951 and 1957: player rights. The reserve clause and the player draft allowed owners to minimize competition for players and therefore to have salary-setting power over their players, giving them discretion in how much they paid them. Owners and their commissioners employed novel arguments supporting the necessity of having the reserve clause. This chapter first provides an overview of the sorry state of player salaries in professional team sports before considering the owners' explicit use of the reserve clause and how players began challenging it. It concludes with a discussion of Congress's inquiry into player rights, the challenges to the player draft, the formation of players' associations, the outcome of the hearings, and the inquiry's impact on owner-player relations.

Freedom as Accumulation

Black Market ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 17-48
Author(s):  
Aaron Carico
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Fourteenth Amendment ◽  
Court Case ◽  
World Systems ◽  
Economic Relations ◽  
Supreme Court Case ◽  
History Of ◽  
World Systems Analysis ◽  
Southern Country ◽  
The U.S

This chapter reassembles the immediate and concrete history of abolition after 1865, from the counter of the Southern country store to the international trade in cotton, as it sorts out the mechanisms of law and arrangements of political economy that chaperoned the tremendous value incarnated in slaves across the gulf of the Civil War. It explains how citizenship for the formerly enslaved was tethered to the racialization of debt and how the legal relations of formal abolition were actually economic relations of credit. This chapter analyzes the legal history of the Fourteenth Amendment and the interlocking forms of theft it enabled, from Southern sharecropping to New York corporations, from the Freedman’s Bank to the U.S. national debt, showing how liberalism is enmeshed with colonialism. Through a landmark Supreme Court case in 1897, this chapter describes how the personhood of the freed enabled the white accumulation of finance capital through global cotton markets, engaging with the theories of Giovanni Arrighi and world-systems analysis.

scholarly journals The Pre-History of the English Laws Act 1858: Mcliver v Macky (1856)

2010 ◽  
Vol 41 (3) ◽  
pp. 361 ◽  
Author(s):  
David V Williams
Keyword(s):  
New Zealand ◽  
Supreme Court ◽  
British Empire ◽  
Court Case ◽  
General Application ◽  
South Wales ◽  
The Supreme Court ◽  
Supreme Court Case ◽  
History Of ◽  
English Law

The English Laws Act 1858 declared the reception date for the arrival of English law and statutes of general application in New Zealand to be 14 January 1840. This Act was passed because the New Zealand Supreme Court had decided the Wills Act 1837 (UK) did not apply in New Zealand. New Zealand was annexed to the British Empire as a dependency of New South Wales with a reception date in 1825 or 1828. The Supreme Court case that so decided was McLiver v Macky (1856). The New Zealand Law Foundation's 'Lost Cases Project' ascertained that this judgment was fully reported in an Auckland newspaper – The Southern Cross. This article examines the facts of the case and the reasoning of Acting Chief Justice Stephen as to the basis for British sovereignty in New Zealand and the application of English law to British subjects here.

scholarly journals The Administrative State, Front and Center: Studying Law and Administration in Postwar America

2008 ◽  
Vol 26 (2) ◽  
pp. 415-427 ◽  
Author(s):  
Reuel E. Schiller
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
History Textbooks ◽  
Court Case ◽  
Board Of Education ◽  
World War ◽  
Historic Site ◽  
Postwar America ◽  
The Public ◽  
Supreme Court Case ◽  
The Subject

More than any other case from the postwar period,Brown v. Board of Educationhas captured the attention of historians and the public alike. The case itself, and the NAACP's campaign that led to it, have been the subject of books and articles beyond counting. In many history textbooks it is the only court case mentioned between the end of World War II and the early 1960s. It is one of a handful of cases that is recognized by the public at large and is surely the only Supreme Court case that has its own National Historic Site.

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