The Baseball Trust A History of Baseball's Antitrust Exemption

Author: Stuart Banner
Publisher: Oxford University Press USA
ISBN: 9780199389728

Published In: January 2015
Format: Paperback , 304 pages
Jurisdiction: U.S. ? Disclaimer:
Countri(es) stated herein are used as reference only
Hardback Edition ISBN: 9780199930296

List Price: HKD 487.37

HKD 472.75 Save HKD 14.62 (3%)

Download Order Form

Add to Wishlist
| Add to Compare

Description
Contents
Author
Reviews

Details

The first full-length history of baseball's antitrust exemption.
The first to make extensive use of archival sources, including the papers of judges, legislators, and baseball officials.

The Baseball Trust is about the origins and persistence of baseball's exemption from antitrust law, which is one of the most curious features of our legal system and also one of the most well known to sports fans. Every other sport, like virtually every other kind of business, is governed by the antitrust laws, but baseball has been exempt for nearly a century. No one thinks this state of affairs makes any sense. The conventional explanation of this oddity emphasizes baseball's unique cultural status as the national pastime, and assumes that judges and legislators have expressed their love for the game by insulating it from antitrust attack. A serious baseball fan, Stuart Banner provides a thoroughly entertaining history of the game through the prism of the antitrust exemption. But he also narrates a very different kind of baseball history, one in which a sophisticated business organization successfully worked the levers of the legal system to achieve a result enjoyed by no other industry in America. For all the well-documented foibles of the owners of major league baseball teams, baseball has consistently received and followed smart antitrust advice from sharp lawyers, going all the way back to the 1910s. At the same time, it is a story that serves as an arresting reminder of the path-dependent nature of the legal system. At each step, judges and legislators made decisions that were perfectly sensible when considered one at a time, but this series of decisions yielded an outcome that makes no sense at all.

Readership: Sports fans, Lawyers, Historians, and students and scholars of Legal History, American History, and American Studies

Introduction
1. The Reserve Clause
2. The Baseball Trust
3. The Supreme Court Steps In
4. The Birth of the Antitrust Exemption
5. Baseball Becomes Unique
6. A Political Football
7. Three Months of State Antitrust Law
8. The Curt Flood Case
9. The End of the Reserve Clause
10. A Shrunken Exemption

Stuart Banner, Norman Abrams Professor of Law, UCLA

Stuart Banner is a law professor at UCLA. He is the author of several books, including most recently American Property: A History of How, Why, and What We Own (2011). He is a Mets fan and a former little league coach.

"In this important study, Banner provides extensive treatment of organized baseball's battle with antitrust regulations...a decidedly strong contribution to the literature on organized baseball and the law." -Library Journal