For the first time in a long time, Tiger Woods is entering the Masters coming off a win, and feeling good about his golf game.  Woods’ golf game, and life were turned upside down after crashing his car Thanksgiving weekend in 2009.  The crash was followed by accusations of continual infidelity with several women. A week later, US Weekly released a voicemail message left by Woods to one of his alleged mistresses.  Throughout the relentless media coverage, Woods insisted on his family’s right to privacy.  He even chastised the press for invading this right during hiatus from golf.  He said,

“I have always tried to maintain a private space for my wife and children. They have been kept separate from my sponsors, my commercial endorsements. When my children were born, we only released photographs so that the paparazzi could not chase them. However, my behavior doesn’t make it right for the media to follow my two-and-a-half-year-old daughter to school and report the school’s location. They staked out my wife and they pursued my mom. Whatever my wrongdoings, for the sake of my family, please leave my wife and kids alone.”

While Woods certainly had the platform to insist on his privacy, did he have a legal remedy? Could he have sued the media outlets that released the intimiate details of his life to an eager mass audience?

The Legal Blitz asked Professor Patricia Sanchez Abril those same questions.  Professor Abril teaches in the Business Law Department at the University of Miami’s School of Business Administration.  She also wrote the article, “A Simple, Human Measure of Privacy”: Public Disclosure of Private Facts in the World of Tiger Woods. (10 Conn. Pub. Int. L.J. 385) Continue reading →

By Chris McAndrew, a Junior Journalism/Pre-Law major at Temple University

Hank Gathers tragically died during a 1990 game due to a heart condition. Loyola Marymount University settled for $1.4M. The treating cardiologist paid $1M.

Injuries happen in sports all the time.  Whether it’s a minor sprain or a broken bone, athletes of every sport have to worry whether their bodies are truly healthy enough to handle the physicality of their sport.  Lucky for them, leagues often provide expert trainers, coaches and physicians to ensure their health.  But can their health always be assured?

Many recent serious sports injuries have come from the world of professional soccer.  Fabrice Muamba, a midfielder for Bolton, suffered a cardiac arrest while playing a match and collapsed on the field.  He was rushed to the hospital where doctors had said Muamba had died for 78 minutes then came back.  Luckily, the trainers and physicians on hand were prepared for this severe case; others are not always as lucky.

D. Venkatesh, a midfielder for A-division club Bangalore Mars, also suffered a cardiac arrest on the field while playing, but there was no ambulance on site.  He was taken to the hospital in a three-wheel auto-rickshaw where he later died.

So, what happens when an athlete gets injured on the field?  Is the trainer liable for not keeping up with the athlete’s health?  What if the stadium does not have proper transportation for injured athletes, are they too liable?

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Former NFL agent Josh Luchs became an agent at 19 and represented more than 60 players before the NFLPA revoked his certification (Photo courtesy SI).

Since reading Jim Bouton’s, Ball Four there have not been many sports “tell-alls” that have excited me. Most of these books feel like a last-ditch attempt to scream, “Look at me!” to jump back into the spotlight for another five minutes. Most books in this so-called genre are told with ulterior motives and most lack any sort of story-telling flow or valuable revelations. So I was at first skeptical of Josh Luchs’ new book, Illegal Procedure: A Sports Agent Comes Clean On The Dirty Business of College Football, which hit bookshelves today. But ever since the earth-shaking Sports Illustrated cover story in which Luchs first revealed just how extensively NCAA rules are flaunted in college football, Luchs has been nothing but consistent in his message, and steadfast in his desire to shine a spotlight on all of the gritty underpinnings of the sports agent industry.

Like bed bugs on a thousand-dollar mattress, Luchs exposes the skin-crawling truth under the glamorous surface of being a sports agent in a straight forward, yet entertaining manner in Illegal Procedure.

At times it is hard to believe that this naïve Jewish kid growing up in Beverly Hills, a real schmegegge at times, could do things like give an NFL star clean urine for a drug test or tap into his Bar Mitzvah money to bribe a college athlete. Yet while you want to hate the messenger, a man who admittedly flaunted almost every rule in the book, Luchs’ honest and self-deprecating narration makes the reader empathize with an agent just trying to succeed in a broken system. Luchs masterfully weaves his personal life into this nonstop shocker of admissions and revelations about just how crooked the business of college football really is. He does so by dishing out the truth about hypocritical college coaches like Nick Saban, who grants his own agent unlimited access to the locker room while publicly referring to agents as “pimps,” or devout Christian Jim Tressel, who rigged summer camp raffles to make sure his top recruits won prizes. Nobody is safe. NCAA Compliance Officers, NFLPA executives and even the hallowed lawyer are all exposed.

The best part about this book, though, is that it isn’t just a tell-all. Luchs proposes a slew of well-designed proposals to fix the current, shattered state of big-time college athletics. There is a lot to learn from this book and it should be required reading for not only everyone in the sports industry, but everyone who cares about the well-being of college athletes, the game of football and the institutions that make up the NCAA.

Fortunately for us here at The Legal Blitz, Luchs took time out of his media whirlwind to discuss his new book and future efforts to effect positive change in college athletics.

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By Colin Tansits, a sophomore at Temple University’s School of Communications and Theater.

New York guard Jeremy Lin has led the Knicks to a 13-9 record since joining the starting lineup.

New York Knicks guard Jeremy Lin has become a polarizing figure in sports over the past few months. With his emergence out of seemingly nowhere into the spotlight of New York City, Lin transformed the world of sports.

His shy demeanor off the court paired with his offensive abilities on the court –averaging 14.7 points and 6.3 assists per game — put Jeremy Lin into a (lin)probable situation: his name is now being inserted into words to create a new word. The most popular word created basically sums up the entire story of the Harvard graduate, “lin-sanity.”

But with all of this hype, across all forms of media, where does the law fit into Jeremy Lin’s amazing rise to national stardom? Who owns the term “Lin-sanity” and why do they own it? Does Jeremy Lin have any say in the ownership of a word essentially created with his own last name?

To answer these questions and more, The Legal Blitz tracked down intellectual property expert Jeremy Sheff, a professor at St. John’s University School of Law. Prof. Sheff received his bachelor’s degree from Columbia University in 1999, and his Juris Doctorate from Harvard Law School in 2002. He teaches Introduction to Intellectual Property, Trademarks & Unfair Competition, and Property. His research interests span Intellectual Property law, First Amendment law, and Communications/Internet law.

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In a questionable 2007 decision, international soccer organization FIFA banned the wearing of hijabs by Islamic women players during matches.  The ban of the traditional headscarf, which is often required of Muslim women, affected their right to play the sport.  Last week, FIFA finally voted to lift the ban after much protest.

Reports surfaced at one point of an alternative cap, but it has drawn some opposition because it does not fully cover the neck, as hijabs traditionally do.  Some teams have tried to use other garments to cover their necks, but there has been great push-back from officials. During the ban, multiple women’s soccer teams were forced to forfeit their matches; most notably, the Iranian women’s soccer team were asked to remove their turtlenecks during a match but refused, and were subsequently forced to forfeit their 2012 Olympic qualifying match.

Of course, no league intentionally stands in the way of an athlete’s ability to practice religion. Nevertheless, this ban effectively restricted access to the game for many Islamic women.  Professor Linda Sheryl Greene is the Evjue Bascom Professor at the University of Wisconsin Law School and this academic year is also the Distinguished Inaugural Lee Chair in Constitutional Law at the John Marshall Law School, Chicago.

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