Jackie Robinson's Civic, Legal, and Political Legacy

Robinson and reporters, Birmingham, 1963 (LC)

[We have word of the following.] 

The Jackie Robinson Symposium: Civic, Legal, and Political Legacy.  National Archives at Kansas City. 1616 East 18th Street, Kansas City, MO 64108.  Monday, April 1, 2019 - 8:00 a.m. to 2:00 p.m.

On Monday, April 1, from 8:00 a.m. - 2:00 p.m., the National Archives at Kansas City in partnership with the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum will host a public symposium The Jackie Robinson Symposium: Civic, Legal, and Political Legacy.  This event will be held at the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum and will include lunch.

This event is held in partnership with UMKC Law School, Park University, and other community partners.  The event also serves as a Continuing Legal Education (CLE) program for regional lawyers, judges and legal professionals. You can register to receive the CLE credit or as a Non-CLE participant.  Registration and more information is here . The program is ideal for legal history, military history, African American history, and sports history scholars and enthusiast.

Sepper and Dinner on Sex in Public

Elizabeth Sepper, Washington University in Saint Louis School of Law, and Deborah Dinner, Emory University School of Law, have posted Sex in Public, which is to appear in the Yale Law Journal:

This Article recounts the first history of sex in public accommodations law—a history essential to debates that rage today over gender and sexuality in public. Just fifty years ago, not only sexual minorities but also cisgender women were the subject of discrimination in public. Restaurants and bars displayed "men-only" signs. Women held secondary-status in civic organizations, like Rotary and Jaycees, and were excluded altogether from many professional bodies, like press clubs. Sports—from the Little League to the golf club—kept girls and women from achieving athletic excellence. Insurance companies and financial institutions subsumed married women's identities within those of their husbands. Over the course of the 1970s, the feminist movement protested and litigated against sex discrimination in public accommodations. They secured state laws opening up commerce and leisure for "full and equal enjoyment" by both sexes. At the time "sex" was added to state public accommodations laws, feminists, their opponents, and government actors understood sex equality in public to signify more than equal access to the public sphere. It also implicated freedom from the regulation of sexuality and gender performance and held the potential to transform institutions central to dominant masculinity, like baseball fields and bathrooms. This history informs the interpretation of public accommodations laws in controversies from same-sex couples' wedding cakes to transgender people's restroom access.

Madison on the Football as an IP Object

Michael J. Madison, University of Pittsburgh School of Law, has posted The Football as Intellectual Property Object, which is forthcoming in A History of Intellectual Property in 50 Objects, edited by Dan Hunter and Claudy Op Den Kamp (Cambridge University Press).

Soccer Match, 1928 (NYPL)

The histories of technology and culture are filled with innovations that emerged and took root by being shared widely, only to be succeeded by eras of growth framed by intellectual property. The Internet is a modern example. The football, also known as the pelota, ballon, bola, balón, and soccer ball, is another, older, and broader one. The football lies at the core of football. Intersections between the football and intellectual property law are relatively few in number, but the football supplies a focal object through which the great themes of intellectual property have shaped the game: origins; innovation and standardization; and relationships among law and rules, on the one hand, and the organization of society, culture, and the economy, on the other.

Sunday Book Roundup

Here's another roundup gathered while on the archive trail, this time from sunny St. Paul and the Minnesota History Center.

From The New York Times is a review of Konrad H. Jarausch's Out of Ashes: A New History Europe in the Twentieth Century (Princeton University Press).

We Believe The Children: A Moral Panic in the 1980s (PublicAffairs) by Richard Beck is reviewed in The Washington Post.

"Beck makes the case that the sexual abuse trials of the 1980s yoked numerous undercurrents in American society: fear of crime; the decline of respect for traditional authority; homophobia (being gay helped send some day-care workers to prison); the conservative backlash against feminism, which had encouraged women to work outside the home (with its resultant need for day care); and the reality that the patriarchal nuclear family had not just changed, it had become “incoherent.”"

Over at New Books, Mia Bay, who co-edited Toward an Intellectual History of Black Women along with Farah Griffin, Martha Jones and Barbara Savage (UNC Press), is interviewed.

David George Surdham also discusses his book, The Big Leagues Go to Washington: Congress and Sports Antitrust, 1951-1989 (University of Illinois Press).

"Just back from the Major League Baseball All-Star break, Surdham has written a book for sports lovers. Why do major league sports receive such preferential treatment from Congress? And what does this have to do with labor and economic development policy? Surdham examines Congressional hearings held over decades to figure out how Washington's role in professional sports has changed over since the 1950s."

In the third interview from New Books, William Leogrande and Peter Kornbluh discuss their new book, Back Channel to Cuba: The Hidden History of Negotiations Between Washington and Havana (UNC Press).

Lastly, after you've read Karen Tani's review of Laura Edwards's A Legal History of the Civil War and Reconstruction: A Nation of Rights you can listen to Edwards discuss the book. The abstract says it covers the following topics:

"–The way, in the lead up to the Civil War, all arguments came back to the Constitution.
–How wartime policies in both the Confederacy and the states that remained in the Union fundamentally remade the –legal authority of the nation.
–Why the Confederacy's legal order was at odds with its stated governing principles.
–Popular conceptions of Reconstruction-era legal change."

Terry Alford's Fortune's Fool: The Life of John Wilkes Booth (Oxford University Press) is reviewed by the Los Angeles Review of Books. 

"It is in this section of the book that Alford’s subject nearly attains the dimensions of the great tragic figure he perceived himself to be. Then, in the closing passages, the author maps his swift and pitiful decline. As the hobbled, desperate Booth flees his pursuers through rural Virginia after the assassination, he reads newspaper dispatches from the capital and is stunned to discover that his crime has been met with heartbreak and contempt, and that even supporters of the Confederacy had described him as a dastardly coward. “Our country owed all of her troubles to him,” he writes in his journal, “and God simply made me the instrument of his punishment. I can never regret it.”"

H-Net adds a review of Adam Wesley Dean's An Agrarian Republic: Farming, Antislavery Politics, and Nature Parks in the Civil War Era (UNC Press).

"Adam Wesley Dean's An Agrarian Republic: Farming, Antislavery Politics, and Nature Parks in the Civil War Era returns readers to the "fundamentally agrarian" character of antebellum and wartime Republican political ideology. Building on the work of historians like Foner, William Gienapp, and Mark Lause, Dean analyzes the rhetoric of key Republican figures in order to reconstruct the system of "beliefs, fears, values, and commitments" that comprised the party's predominant ideology, and that subsequently "spurred action" (p. 4)."

 The New Rambler takes a look at Jon Elster's Securities Against Misrule: Juries, Assemblies, Elections (Cambridge University Press).

Sunday Book Roundup

Law and Politics Book Review has reviewed Michael Avery and Danielle McLaughlin's The Federalist Society: How Conservatives Took the Law Back from Liberals (Vanderbilt University
Press).

The Los Angeles Review of Books has two reviews of interest this week. The first is a review of Aviva Chomsky's Undocumented: How Immigration Became Illegal (Beacon Press).

The second is a review of J. Douglas Smith's On Democracy's Doorstep: The Inside Story of How the Supreme Court Brought 'One Person, One Vote' to the United States (Hill and Wang).

"Smith discusses the importance of, and tension between, attorneys, judges, special interests, and activists. This is a battle we continue to wage. But the big difference between today’s Court and the Court described in On Democracy’s Doorstep is that the old Court successfully rejected the arguments of entrenched interests, such as corporations, and instead strengthened the principle of “one person, one vote.” Now the opposite is happening. It increasingly feels that we’re rewinding much of the progress detailed in On Democracy’s Doorstep."

The Federal Lawyer has released its print reviews for May/June. Reviewed books include The Baseball Trust: A History of Baseball's Antitrust Exemption by Stuart Banner (Oxford University Press) and Louis D. Brandeis's MIT Lectures on Law (1892-1894) edited by Robert F. Cochran Jr. (Carolina Academic Press). You can find Cochran's Editor's Introduction on SSRN.

The New York Times has a review of Scalia: A Court of One by Bruce Allen Muphy (Simon & Schuster).

"Last fall the pugilistic Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia gave an interview to Jennifer Senior in New York Magazine so playful and revealing that the transcript could nearly be made into a stage play and movie, in the manner of “Frost/Nixon.” 

Justice Scalia, 78, and Ms. Senior, 44, faced off across a generational, political and religious chasm. The most memorable moment was probably when Justice Scalia began speaking about how Satan operates in the modern world. 

When Ms. Senior widened her eyes, he pounced. “You’re looking at me as though I’m weird,” he said. “My God! Are you so out of touch with most of America, most of which believes in the Devil? I mean, Jesus Christ believed in the Devil! It’s in the Gospels!” He added about her stare: “I was offended by that. I really was.” 

This moment captures the man we meet in Bruce Allen Murphy’s sweeping new intellectual biography, “Scalia: A Court of One,” in pea-size form. That is to say, Mr. Murphy delivers to us a man driven by three fundamental and nearly operatic qualities: a deep delight in argument, a florid and highly traditional Roman Catholicism and an insatiable need for attention to be paid."

If you haven't had your fill of reviews on Waldman's The Second Amendment: A Biography (Simon & Schuster) there is yet another this week from the Washington Independent Review of Books here.

Laurence Tribe and Joshua Matz's Uncertain Justice: The Roberts Court and the Constitution (Henry Holt) made the LA Times "Summer Books Preview 2014."

Perhaps interesting to readers is an excerpt from Elizabeth Losh's book, The War on Learning: Gaining Ground in the Digital University (MIT Press) in Salon. Reflecting on her article about online cheating videos created by high school and college students, Losh writes,

"I thought the cheating videos were interesting because they demonstrated an argument that I had been developing over the course of the past decade. First, with regard to everyday practices and long-term goals, formal institutions of codified pedagogy, represented by universities, were increasingly in conflict with individuals who were informally self-taught. Second, access to and use of computational media frequently seemed to exacerbate this tension."

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.

Banner's "Baseball Trust"

The latest from Stuart Banner, a Mets fan, a former little league coach, and the Norman Abrams Professor of Law at the UCLA School of Law, is The Baseball Trust: A History of Baseball's Antitrust Exemption, published by Oxford University Press.  Saith the press:

The impact of antitrust law on sports is in the news all the time, especially when there is labor conflict between players and owners, or when a team wants to move to a new city. And if the majority of Americans have only the vaguest sense of what antitrust law is, most know one thing about it-that baseball is exempt.

In The Baseball Trust, legal historian Stuart Banner illuminates the series of court rulings that resulted in one of the most curious features of our legal system-baseball's exemption from antitrust law. A serious baseball fan, Banner provides a thoroughly entertaining history of the game as seen through the prism of an extraordinary series of courtroom battles, ranging from 1890 to the present. The book looks at such pivotal cases as the 1922 Supreme Court case which held that federal antitrust laws did not apply to baseball; the 1972 Flood v. Kuhn decision that declared that baseball is exempt even from state antitrust laws; and several cases from the 1950s, one involving boxing and the other football, that made clear that the exemption is only for baseball, not for sports in general. Banner reveals that for all the well-documented foibles of major league owners, baseball has consistently received and followed antitrust advice from leading lawyers, shrewd legal advice that eventually won for baseball a protected legal status enjoyed by no other industry in America.

As Banner tells this fascinating story, he also provides an important reminder of the path-dependent nature of the American legal system. At each step, judges and legislators made decisions that were perfectly sensible when considered one at a time, but that in total yielded an outcome-baseball's exemption from antitrust law-that makes no sense at all.

As you might expect, baseball fans in the ranks of American legal historians have stepped up to the plate and blurbed away:

"This is the best single-volume history of baseball's antitrust exemption. Prof. Banner does an excellent job mining primary sources to show how savvy lawyers and baseball officials laid the groundwork for 'baseball's bizarre monopoly.' Banner brings a lawyer's rigor, a historian's discerning eye, and a baseball fan's ear to this very important work of baseball and American legal history. This is a tale that needed to be told."
-Brad Snyder, author of A Well-Paid Slave: Curt Flood's Fight for Free Agency in Professional Sports

"One of the great puzzles of the history of both baseball and anti-trust law is the 'exemption' granted to the baseball industry from anti-trust law. Nearly everyone agrees that the exemption, which is not available to other professional sports, makes very little sense as a matter of law or economics. Stuart Banner demonstrates that the exemption was not intended to serve the usual reason for avoiding anti-trust laws, but rather to preserve baseball's 'reserve clause,' which bound players indefinitely to their clubs and thereby reduced the players' leverage. By following shrewd advice from lawyers, organized baseball was able to convince both the courts and Congress that replacing the reserve clause with free agency would undermine competitive balance. Even though this turned out not to be the case, baseball's anti-trust exemption remains in place. Banner's book will be the place to start in understanding that curious anomaly."
-G. Edward White, author of Creating the National Pastime

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.