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When the news hit this morning that President Barack Obama was about to nominate Judge Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court, sports fans around the country probably thought, "Why do I know that name?"The answer is because Sotomayor has gained a little bit of fame over the past decade and a half for her involvement in sports-related court decisions.
In 1995, she issued the injunction that ended the Major League Baseball players' strike hours before replacement players were to take the field in official regular-season games. And when Maurice Clarett challenged the NFL's draft-eligibility rules and tried to enter the 2004 draft, Sotomayor was part of a three-judge panel on the Second Circuit Court of Appeals that ruled against Clarett, and upheld the NFL's minimum age requirement.
After being ruled ineligible for his sophomore season in 2003, Clarett, then a star running back at Ohio State, attempted to enter the 2004 draft in spite of an NFL rule that prohibits players from being drafted until they've been out of high school at least three years. A U.S. District Court ruled that the NFL's rule violated federal anti-trust law, but Sotomayor and her panel blocked that ruling, instead ruling that labor law in this case trumped anti-trust law and that unions had the right to collectively bargain this sort of age restriction with an employer.
But as Obama said today in his announcement, Sotomayor is more famous for the March 31, 1995 injunction that ended the baseball strike that had canceled the 1994 World Series. In that decision, Sotomayor ripped baseball's owners and commissioner Bud Selig, accusing them of unfair labor practices for scrapping the agreement that was in place because they were frustrated in their attempts to secure a new one.
So that's two sports collective bargaining cases in which the newest Supreme Court nominee has made significant decisions -- one on the side of the league, the other on the side of the players.
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