Michael Weiner Scholarship for Labor Studies

[Not strictly speaking a legal history fellowship, but we're posting this announcement from the Major League Baseball Players Association anyway.]

It is my honor to inform you about a scholarship program created by all Major League baseball players, through the Major League Baseball Players Trust, to honor the life of former MLBPA Executive Director, Michael Weiner. 

The “Michael Weiner Scholarship for Labor Studies,” seeks to recognize and support the efforts of graduate and/or law students dedicated to improving the lives of workers, by awarding up to five $10,000 scholarships annually.

Michael spent 25 years, nearly his entire professional career, with the MLBPA working in support of the Players – past, present and future.  Despite being diagnosed with an inoperable brain tumor in August of 2012, Michael waged an inspiring battle against his disease as he continued to work on behalf of the Players right up to the time of his passing last November, at the age of 51.

I imagine there are several students enrolled in your program who share Michael’s passion for protecting workers’ rights, and, with that in mind, I encourage you to let your students know about this great opportunity.

To be eligible for an award, individuals must be graduate or law students enrolled in an accredited educational institution in the United States or Canada and must have a demonstrated interest in, and wish to make a career out of, working in the labor movement and on behalf of workers’ rights. To receive an award, eligible candidates must meet a combination of criteria identified below:

• A strong academic record
• Demonstrated commitment to the labor movement
• A strong recommendation from an academic or a labor/workers’ rights practitioner
• Strong written and oral communication skills

Preference will be given to those who can demonstrate financial need through the Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA) scores or otherwise.

Scholarship applications are being accepted through Monday, November 10, 2014. Each student selected as a Michael Weiner Scholarship for Labor Studies recipient will receive a $10,000 scholarship. Up to five awards will be presented annually, and the first winners will be notified in January 2015.

For more information, please visit here. Should you have any questions or require additional information, please feel free to call the Players Trust at (212) 826-0809.  Thank you for your consideration and support.

Schmidt on the Baseball Revolution

If Opening Day is in sight, so, evidently, is the latest contribution to the historical literature on law and baseball.  Now comes Explaining the Baseball Revolution, by Christopher W. Schmidt of the Chicago-Kent College of Law and American Bar Foundation.  It appears in Arizona State Law Journal 45 (2013): 1471-1535.  Here is the abstract:    

Between 1966 and 1976, Major League Baseball players won from their club owners a dramatic redistribution of the game’s operational control and revenues. A new era was born, with athletes regularly moving between teams in search of multi-million dollar contracts, periodic strikes, and collective bargaining as the sports industry’s primary policy-making mechanism. In this Article, I offer a new interpretation of how the baseball revolution happened.

In contrast to most accounts, which attribute baseball’s transformation to a convergence of strong personalities and serendipity, I argue that the baseball revolution was the culmination of a reform campaign that is best understood as an instance of what sociolegal scholars call legal mobilization. This campaign revolved around a basic legal claim: that baseball’s “reserve” system denied fundamental rights to the players. This claim failed in court — most famously in Flood v. Kuhn (1972) — yet it resonated elsewhere. The leaders of the baseball revolution — beginning with Marvin Miller, the head of the players’ union — drew upon this rights-based claim for purposes other than winning litigation challenges. In essence, the language of the law allowed the players to reframe the terms of the debate over the reserve system. A struggle that was essentially over power and money became widely understood as a battle for individual freedom. In this way, an improbable legal argument served both to unite and mobilize the players and to secure enough outside support so as to ultimately force the team owners to concede to their demands. Considered through the lens of sociolegal analysis, with its appreciation for the ways in which legal norms function in diverse settings, the baseball revolution offers a valuable case study of the complex interrelation between legal claims, legal institutions, and movement mobilization.

Grow's "Baseball on Trial"

The baseball books keep on coming.  This week, over at Sports Law Blog, Nathaniel Grow, an Assistant Professor of Legal Studies in the Terry College of Business at the University of Georgia, is discussing his new book Baseball on Trial: The Origin of Baseball's Antitrust Exemption.  (The initial post is here.)  Professor Grow tells us that the book “provides the first comprehensive history of the 1922 Supreme Court case of Federal Baseball Club of Baltimore v. National League, the lawsuit giving rise to professional baseball's controversial exemption from federal antitrust law.” His posts will “summarize some of my more interesting discoveries and conclusions.”

Here’s the University of Illinois description of the book:

The controversial 1922 Federal Baseball Supreme Court ruling held that the "business of base ball" was not subject to the Sherman Antitrust Act because it did not constitute interstate commerce. In Baseball on Trial, legal scholar Nathaniel Grow defies conventional wisdom to explain why the unanimous Supreme Court opinion authored by Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, which gave rise to Major League Baseball's exemption from antitrust law, was correct given the circumstances of the time.

Currently a billion dollar enterprise, professional baseball teams crisscross the country while the games are broadcast via radio, television, and internet coast to coast. The sheer scope of this activity would seem to embody the phrase "interstate commerce." Yet baseball is the only professional sport--indeed the sole industry--in the United States that currently benefits from a judicially constructed antitrust immunity. How could this be?

Using recently released documents from the National Baseball Hall of Fame, Grow analyzes how the Supreme Court reached this seemingly peculiar result by tracing the Federal Baseball litigation from its roots in 1914 to its resolution in 1922, in the process uncovering significant new details about the proceedings. Grow observes that while interstate commerce was measured at the time by the exchange of tangible goods, baseball teams in the 1910s merely provided live entertainment to their fans, while radio was a fledgling technology that had little impact on the sport. The book ultimately concludes that, despite the frequent criticism of the opinion, the Supreme Court's decision was consistent with the conditions and legal climate of the early twentieth century.

John Montgomery Ward: The Lawyer Who Took on Baseball

Chicago-Kent College of Law is currently celebrating its 125th anniversary.  As part of the celebration, the school has published Then & Now: Stories of Law and Progress, a collection of essays by Chicago-Kent faculty members exploring what was happening in law and society around the time of the school's founding.  For my contribution, I explored a fascinating episode in late-nineteenth-century baseball history, which featured a famous ballplayer who also happened to be a lawyer.

As 1888 drew to a close, John Montgomery Ward stood atop the world of professional baseball.  The star shortstop had just led the New York Giants to the National League pennant, followed by a triumph over the St. Louis Browns of the rival American Association in what even then went by the inflated title of baseball’s “World Series.”  A dominating pitcher early in his career (he threw the second perfect game in major league history), an arm injury forced Ward to recreate himself as an infielder, where he became one of the best fielders and hitters of his era.  He was lauded in the press as a ballplayer with “few equals and no superiors,” and “by long odds the most popular player in the profession.”  These accomplishments would eventually earn Ward a place in the Baseball Hall of Fame.

Ward’s skills on the ball field were only a part of what made him such a remarkable figure.  Contemporaries and historians alike have struggled to describe him.  One adjective-happy biographer took the saturation approach: he was a “jug-eared, willowy, peach-fuzzed, overreaching punk” as well as “honorable, smart, and tenacious.”  More admired than liked seems to have been the consensus view of Ward contemporaries.  In a profession not known for intellectualism, he stood out.  Although Ward left school at the age of thirteen in order to pursue his baseball career, he eventually earned, in his spare time, degrees in political science and law from Columbia.  He was said to speak five languages.  A regular contributor to newspapers and periodicals, in 1888 he published Baseball: How to Become a Player, which he described as a “handbook of the game, a picture of the play as seen by a player.” 

Ward was also a pioneering labor leader. In 1885 he established America’s first sports union, the Brotherhood of Professional Base Ball Players.  Initially designed to help sick, injured, or hard-up ballplayers and promote professional standards, the Brotherhood quickly evolved into something approaching a craft union for ballplayers.  Ward had forward-looking attitudes on race as well.  At a time when the color line was hardening in American society, and organized baseball had become a whites-only affair, Ward urged the Giants to sign an African American pitcher.