Denver professor recognized for writing best SCOTUS brief of the year
By Michael T. Nietzel
Forbes
Six scholars were awarded the Education Law Association’s (ELA) Steinhilber Award last month for writing the best legal brief of the year. Their amicus brief was presented to the U. S. Supreme Court in the case of NCAA v. Shawne Alston, by Erik Jaffe, a U.S. Supreme Court Bar member from Washington, D.C., who edited the brief on the historians’ behalf and sent it on to the Supreme Court.
The award offers a powerful reminder of the abiding relevance of the humanities and a recognition that there’s nothing that can be as practical as well-informed scholarship.
In Alston, a unanimous Supreme Court agreed with the historians’ claim that National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) amateurism was a myth and that the NCAA’s existing policy on it was a violation of the Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890. The Supreme Court ruling upheld a decision by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit that had struck down NCAA caps on the academic benefits - such as reimbursements and pay for academic-related expenses - that student-athletes can receive.
With its ruling, the Court forced the NCAA into a new reality, where NCAA-mandated restrictions on student-athlete compensation are ended and the door is cracked open for current and incoming student-athletes to be paid for the use of their name, images and likenesses.
The six authors - most of whom hold academic appointments or are emeritus faculty - are:
Ron Smith, sports historian and professor emeritus at Pennsylvania State University. Smith, who organized the writing of the brief, has written extensively about sports including his most recent work, The Myth of the Amateur, which describes the history of paying college athletes ever since the first American intercollegiate contest in 1852 when a rowing match between Harvard and Yale turned into an all-expenses-paid vacation in exchange for the competitors’ participation.
Taylor Branch, who’s best known for his award winning trilogy of books chronicling the life of Martin Luther King Jr. Taylor has written for several publications over the years such as The Washington Monthly, Harper’s, and The New Republic. He was a lecturer at Goucher College in the late 1990s and is a past recipient of a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship (the “genius award”).
Dick Crepeau, Professor of History at the University of Central Florida. He has written widely about American sport history, including the book Baseball: America’s Diamond Mind, 1919-1941.
Sarah Fields, a lawyer and sports historian in the Communication Department at the University of Colorado, Denver. Among her most influential publications are Game Faces: Sport Celebrity and the Laws of Reputation, and Female Gladiators: Gender, Law, and Contact Sport in America, a book on legal aspects of women in contact sports.
Jay Smith, Professor of History at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. Smith, whose speciality is this history of early-modern France, is also the co-author, along with Mary Willingham, of Cheated: The UNC Scandal, the Education of Athletes, and the Future of Big-Time College Sports, an expose of the athletic-academic scandal that rocked UNC several years ago.
John Thelin, University Research Professor in the Department of Educational Policy Studies and Evaluation at the University of Kentucky. Thelin is best known as the author of several definitive works on the history of higher education including A History of American Higher Education, published by Johns Hopkins Press. He also wrote Games Colleges Play, which traces the history of intercollegiate athletics from 1910 to 1990 and is cited frequently in the Supreme Court decision written by Justice Gorsuch.
In bestowing the honor, the Education Law Association committee that made the selection (along with another brief that “tied” for first place with the Alston brief) wrote:
“Your brief was highly original in its concept, well organized, clear, concise, easy to follow, and masterful in its application of related legal literature. Reviewers praised your frank discussion of the limits of amateurism as an ‘historical fiction’ in college sports and were very impressed that Justice Gorsuch cited this brief in his majority opinion.”
The award will be formally presented at the ELA’s “hybrid conference” to be held in San Antonio, Texas on October 20-23.