Last month, I blogged about U.S. Congressman Steve Cohen requesting that NBA commissioner David Stern and NBPA executive director Billy Hunter eliminate the NBA’s age limit, which requires that a player be 19 years old plus one year removed from high school in order to be eligible for the NBA Draft (the rule was negotiated in 2005; previously, players could join the NBA right after finishing high school). The NBA and NBPA will be negotiating a new CBA in the near future and the age limit will likely be a source of tension between the two bargaining units.

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Lester Munson of ESPN has a lengthy column on American Needle v. NFL (see here, here, and here). Among the many law professors he speaks with is our own Barry Law School-bound Marc Edelman.

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Former MLB pitcher David Cone testified today before the Senate Judiciary Committee on the nominate of Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court. The video of the full day can be found on the Committee Website. Cone’s statement, discussing Sotomayor’s decision in the 1995 baseball labor dispute that essentially ended the 1994 strike (and, in Cone’s words, “saved baseball”) begins at 461:30.

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Connecticut Law Review will be publishing an essay I’ve written on Judge Sotomayor and two of her most important sports law decisions: Silverman v. Major League Baseball Player Relations Committee and Clarett v. National Football League.

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The Ryan Church – Jeff Francoeur trade between the Mets and the Braves on Friday involved two players among the 111 who filed for salary arbitration prior to this season. The Mets also received $270,218 to equalize the salaries. There is already plenty to read on the Internet about the deal, but since my contributions to the Sports Law Blog deal with salary arbitration, I will offer a bit of information and place the rest in comments if anyone is interested in further discussion.

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Bruce Weber (author of the outstanding story of the umpiring profession, As They See ‘Em) has a piece taking down the judges-as-umpires analogy. What does not come up in the piece is the point that, not only does the analogy misconstrue what judges do, but it denigrates what umpires do–the amount of discretion, perspective, purposivism, and judgment involved in umpiring.

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Marquette law professor Matt Mitten, who is also Director of the National Sports Law Institute, passes along information on a call for papers:

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As you might recall, five NFL playersKevin and Pat Williams of the Minnesota Vikings and Charles Grant, Deuce McAllister, and Will Smith of the New Orleans Saintswere suspended for four games last year after testing positive for bumetanide, a diuretic that can be used to mask the presence of steroids. The players claimed that they inadvertently ingested the bumetanide when they took StarCaps, an over-the-counter weight-loss supplement. Bumetanide is not listed as an ingredient in StarCaps, but the players proved that bumetanide was present in the StarCaps they consumed.

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The Red Sox fan who was kicked out of (old) Yankee Stadium when he tried to leave the seating area during the playing of God Bless America back in 2008 has settled his lawsuit against the City and the Yankees. I wrote about the suit here and here.

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Recently published scholarship includes:

Christopher Bidlack, Comment, The prohibition of prosthetic limbs in American sports: the issues and the role of the Americans with Disabilities Act, 19 MARQUETTE SPORTS LAW REVIEW 613 (2009)

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