Sarah Walsh is a former competitive cheerleader and current third year student at the University of Virginia School of Law. He was working over the summer when he learned about a new course offered in the fall and he, naturally, jumped at the chance to tell his friends about it.
“We’re taking this, aren’t we?!?” Walsh texted directly to classmates Jack Brown and Parker Kelly.
“This” is not Torts or Legal Research or Contracts or a traditional law course. Instead, it has terms like “make-up call” and “whistle swallow” and “competitive hot dog eating” in its description.
“I’m really excited,” said Walsh, an Atlanta native and big baseball fan.
Since the end of August, Professor Richard Re has been teaching “Sports and Games” in front of a packed on the second floor of the classroom in Slaughter Hall part of the Law School. Brown and Kelly were in that crowd. It didn’t take much convincing from Walsh to sign up.
The trio did not disappoint.
“This course has helped me think a lot about adjudicating decisions in the real world, in a mundane context,” said Brown, a third-year law student from Alexandria. “I gained practical experience doing something that I would never have otherwise. It helped me in making decisions and made me more clear about what rules I made, what rules I followed.
This course is based on “The Jurisprudence of Sport: Sports and Games as Legal Systems,” a casebook co-written by law professor Mitchell Berman from the University of Pennsylvania and Richard Friedman from the University of Michigan. Re, Berman’s friend, sent a book, sparking his interest in creating a course.
“You can make a lot of the same points about the wisdom and value of the rules or the role that society plays in regulating adjudication in sports and games, and the law,” Re said. “The great thing about approaching it from a sports-and-games angle is that naturally we eliminate a lot of preconceptions that we bring with us into legal discussions. And we bring in new preconceptions.
“So it’s interesting to do a deep dive into this question in the context of sports or games and, then at the end of it, step back and say, ‘OK, how does it compare to similar questions in law?'”
The latest Sports and Games class focused on a case close to the heart Re: the 2019 National Football Conference championship game, when there were no calls at the end of the game that benefited the Los Angeles Rams and possibly harmed the New Orleans Saints. Super Bowl.
Re, a New Orleans native and lifelong Saints fan, opened the class by promising to try to stay calm and hold back tears when he played a clip of Rams defensive back Nickell Robey-Coleman leveling Saints receiver Tommylee Lewis before a pass arrived. The third-down game happened with the game tied at 20 and under two minutes left in the game. If the officials call a pass interference penalty, there’s a good chance the Saints could run out the clock before kicking the game-winning field goal.
Instead, there was enough time in the game for both teams to trade field goals. The Rams eventually won in overtime, ending the Saints’ season. Reacting to public outcry, the National Football League made all forms of pass interference and non-calls subject to video review next season. The experiment, considered a failure, was discontinued after a year.
The breakdown of the play – and its fallout – led to a class discussion with some legal analogies.
Re said Rucho v. Common cause, the landmark case of the Supreme Court in 2019 that ruled partisan gerrymandering beyond the reach of the federal court, will typically be analyzed in legal education through the federal court or election law course. But Sports and Games provided a platform for Emma McLaughlin, a second-year law student, to think about it in a more relatable context.
What McLaughlin “sees as one of the main issues of the debate in that case is the exact same issue that we are talking about in instant replay,” said Re. “One of the main issues at stake in this divisive case is if the federal courts get involved a little bit, what happens next? Where do we draw the line when we’re involved and we’re not involved? If we dip our toe in, we end up all the way in the pool? If we give a mouse a cookie, will the mouse come back a thousand times over?”
Dez Bryant’s no-catch for the Dallas Cowboys against the Green Bay Packers during the 2014 NFL playoffs is among the most famous sports clips used to spark unique dialogue in law classes.
In other words, the NFL, in the role of the Supreme Court in this situation, risked a slippery slope with its knee-jerk reaction to the no-call in New Orleans.
Jonathan Peterson, a third-year law student from Charlottesville, said his main takeaway from the Rams-Saints presentation was the NFL’s legitimacy issue.
“If you hear requests for exceptions all the time and you review the calls you make with others, you open yourself up to a lot of potential for dissatisfaction and mistrust of people who see themselves as being right within the rules,” said Peterson.
“I’m not a fan of the idea that finality is so important for judicial legitimacy, because I think our main goal should be to get the right call, and not have that focus. But I think it shows how important it is, especially now where I think judicial legitimacy is wrong one of the biggest problems facing the court.
Re has been able to attract this type of discussion through some examples of real-life sports. The list of clips he plays in class includes the controversial no-catch involving Dallas Cowboys’ Dez Bryant in the 2014 NFL playoffs, tennis player Serena Williams’ foot error at the 2009 US Open and even Anthony Poindexter’s goal line stop from Warrick. Dunn to power UVA’s football upset at Florida State University in 1995.
The course begins with an August class that is centered on the age-old question: Can hot coconuts eat sports?
Sampling students produces a different argument.
Walsh: “The best part is it’s not a sport, but (15-time Nathan’s Hot Dog Eating Contest winner) Joey Chestnut is an athlete.
Kelly: “Absolutely a sport.”
Brown: “There is an alternative option that this degenerate sports – it is close to sports, but it lacks something. One of the things we talked about is that sports should have high aspirations for them. Like, when you see the best athletes in the NBA or NFL or football, and you’re like, ‘Wow, these guys are in amazing shape. better.’
“But there’s a degenerate aspect of eating hot dogs where you don’t see this and think you’re going to push it. Maybe there’s all the training and dedication, but something’s missing there.
Don’t worry, there’s a legal lesson here.
“We talk a lot about the idea of family resemblance as a way to understand why there is a sport and how there are not these strict categories, in the same way that everyone in the same family is not going to look identical,” Kelly said.
Sean Onwualu ’24 (center in pink shirt) adds to the discussion during a recent Sports and Games class.
And in the law, Brown said, “It is common to say, ‘Is this thing similar enough that this other thing should bear it?’ This is similar, ‘This is a sport and should be evaluated in the same way?’
Walsh, who was eager to join his friends in this course, now calls Sports and Games “easily my favorite class I took in Law School.”
Re, a Yale Law alumnus, is well aware of the rigorous law school curriculum, loaded in a large amount of reading and studying dense topics. All he’s trying to do this semester is offer a fresh — but still well-deserved — break from the norm.
“One of the challenges in legal education sometimes — which I think UVA does a good job of addressing — is that you can have a problem where students feel like they’re stuck in rules, rules, rules,” Re said. . “There is a big book about these things, like hundreds of pages of these rules. It’s good and important to learn these rules, but it’s also important to step back and understand what we’re doing here. And what’s animating the rules and so on.
“I think that’s part of the theoretical perspective of what this course is about naturally.”
