To all those who think they want to go into sports law, here is some advice from an expert, Matt Mitten:
“I tell the students, ‘Watching a sporting event is never the same.'”
As the longtime director of the National Sports Law Institute at Marquette University Law School, Mitten has experience viewing games through a legal lens.
He remains a fan — his office at Marquette is sprinkled with sports trinkets like baseballs and bobbleheads. But it has been a long time since Mitten could just watch a sporting event for pure enjoyment.
To the law professor, sports are about more than balls and strikes or wins and losses. They’re part of lucrative businesses built on a legal foundation.
“Every aspect of law impacts the sports industry,” he said.
This week, Mitten starts a two-year term as president of the Sports Lawyers Association, a national group of some 1,800 practicing lawyers, professors, industry professionals and students.
On May 19, he’s scheduled to appear before the Knight Commission on Intercollegiate Athletics, as he pushes a plan to reform college sports through federal regulation.
Mitten, 56, has an easygoing manner. He doesn’t pretend to have all the answers about sports law. He remains intellectually curious about the twists and turns on an ever-changing legal field of play. And as a testament to his expertise, he landed a slot as a member of the Court of Arbitration for Sport ad hoc division at the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi, Russia. The special tribunal resolves legal disputes that bubble up during the competition.
Unplanned career
Growing up in Toledo, Ohio, Mitten was an all-city high school wrestler. Besides playing football and baseball, he ran track for a year, but jokes the longest he wanted to run was 100 yards.
After he turned 40, he ran his first and only marathon.
Mitten got his undergraduate degree in economics from Ohio State and his law degree from the University of Toledo College of Law.
He fell into the sports law game while working as a young attorney with a major Atlanta law firm. He handled a couple of sports-related cases, including one that revolved around a trademark and another that dealt with a noncompete clause. The latter case was kind of sticky because a local YMCA wanted to stop a popular aerobics instructor from setting up shop nearby. The case settled out of court.
Mitten said he always wanted to try his hand at teaching law. He got a job at South Texas College of Law in Houston and when he arrived, the dean said students were petitioning for a sports law class.
Mitten taught his first sports law class in 1991, as the discipline was starting to attract interest. Sports law textbooks were being published. The National Sports Law Institute also was up and running under founding director Martin J. Greenberg.
Greenberg oversaw the institute from 1989 to 1997. Mitten became director in 1999.
“Matt has taken it to the next level,” Greenberg said. “He is definitely an academic but has practical experience. He brings that to the table.”
Greenberg said Mitten and Paul Anderson, the associate director, have helped build the institute that is associated with Marquette’s nationally renowned sports law program.
“If you’re thinking of going into the area of sports law in the United States, there is no place to think of other than Milwaukee, Wisconsin,” Greenberg said. “This law school has 14 (sports law) courses, takes a continuous long view and has numerous internships with practicing lawyers and organizations involved with sports.”
Breadth of research
What does it take to make it in sports law?
“You’ve got to be a very good lawyer, first,” Mitten said.
Sports law, he said, “is a great vehicle for educating law students because they get exposed to a lot of areas of law they might not have thought about. The knowledge and skills they learn have application to representing clients outside the sports industry.”
The breadth of sports law research at Marquette is on display in the current issue of the Marquette Sports Law Review. Scholars tackle subjects as diverse as medical privacy, regulating sponsored content and the prospects of fans owning a franchise outside the major sports of football, baseball, basketball and hockey.
A big issue in sports law these days is the case of former UCLA basketball player Ed O’Bannon. In 2014, a federal judge ruled that the NCAA violated antitrust law when it sought to prohibit athletes from being compensated for the use of their name, image or likeness. The NCAA has appealed.
The case could fundamentally change the economic landscape of college sports, where some coaches earn millions of dollars annually while student-athletes receive scholarships. Even though billions of dollars flow through the college sports landscape, only a handful of programs report revenues exceeding expenses.
Mitten and Stephen F. Ross, a sports law professor at Penn State University, have proposed a new way for college sports to move forward in the 21st century. They claim lawsuits aren’t the way to achieve reform.
Instead, they seek to have Congress establish a federal regulatory commission that would work with the NCAA and its member schools to establish rules to govern college sports. Why would the NCAA participate? Under their proposal, the scholars offer a “carrot” of antitrust immunity for any rules enacted.
The authors say their model could “enhance the academic integrity of intercollegiate athletics, promote more competitive balance in intercollegiate sports competition and require university athletic departments to operate with fiscal responsibility.”
Mitten will carry that message to Washington, D.C., when he appears on a panel at the Knight Commission, which promotes reform in college athletics.
Mitten is a realist. He doesn’t expect everyone in college sports to jump at the proposal. But he is eager to spread the idea.
The aim, Mitten said, “is try to keep the best of college sports but make it better for student-athletes.”
