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The Baseball Trust A History of Baseball's Antitrust Exemption

ISBN: 9780199930296 | 0199930295

Format: Hardcover
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Pub. Date: 4/1/2013

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Summary Author Biography

The Baseball Trustis about the origins and persistence of baseball's exemption from antitrust law, which is one of the most curious features of our legal system and also one of the most well known to sports fans. Every other sport, like virtually every other kind of business, is governed by the antitrust laws, but baseball has been exempt for nearly a century. No one thinks this state of affairs makes any sense. The conventional explanation of this oddity emphasizes baseball's unique cultural status as the national pastime, and assumes that jud... MOREges and legislators have expressed their love for the game by insulating it from antitrust attack. A serious baseball fan, Stuart Banner provides a thoroughly entertaining history of the game through the prism of the antitrust exemption. But he also narrates a very different kind of baseball history, one in which a sophisticated business organization successfully worked the levers of the legal system to achieve a result enjoyed by no other industry in America. For all the well-documented foibles of the owners of major league baseball teams, baseball has consistently received and followed smart antitrust advice from sharp lawyers, going all the way back to the 1910s. At the same time, it is a story that serves as an arresting reminder of the path-dependent nature of the legal system. At each step, judges and legislators made decisions that were perfectly sensible when considered one at a time, but this series of decisions yielded an outcome that makes no sense at all.

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.

Stuart Banner is Norman Abrams Professor of Law at the University of California, Los Angeles School of Law. A noted legal historian, he is the author of many books, including most recently American Property: A History of How, Why, and What We Own; Who Owns the Sky? The Struggle to Control Airspace from the Wright Brothers On; and Possessing the Pacific: Land, Settlers, and Indigenous People from Australia to Alaska.

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