Cornell Law Review Volume 43 Article 2 Issue 4 Summer 1958 Organized Professional Team Sports and the Anti- Trust Laws Samuel R. Pierce Jr. Follow this and additional works at: http://scholarship.law.cornell.edu/clr Part of the Law Commons Recommended Citation Samuel R. Pierce Jr., Organized Professional Team Sports and the Anti-Trust Laws , 43 Cornell L. Rev. 566 (1958) Available at: http://scholarship.law.cornell.edu/clr/vol43/iss4/2 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the Journals at Scholarship@Cornell Law: A Digital Repository. It has been accepted for inclusion in Cornell Law Review by an authorized administrator of Scholarship@Cornell Law: A Digital Repository. For more information, please contact
[email protected]. ORGANIZED PROFESSIONAL TEAM SPORTS AND THE ANTITRUST LAWS Samuel R. Pierce, Jr..* To what extent, if any, should organized professional team sports' be exempt from the federal antitrust laws? This problem has received substantial consideration by the judiciary and Congress, but to date remains unresolved. An analysis of this perplexing question together with a proposed solution is the task undertaken in this paper. 1. HISTORY OF THE PROBLEM The Federal Baseball case,2 decided by the Supreme Court in 1922, is the genesis of any discussion concerning the application of anti- trust laws to organized professional team sports. In that case it was unanimously held' that organized professional baseball was not inter- state commerce, and therefore was not subject to the federal antitrust laws. Mr. Justice Holmes, in writing the opinion of the Court, pointed out that baseball was neither "interstate" nor "commerce." He took the position that "exhibitions of baseball"' -were "purely state affairs"5 with only incidental effects on interstate commerce, and that as baseball involved "personal effort, not related to production,"' it was "not a sub- ject of commerce.