For the summer 2016 term, starting May 9, Bob Jarvis, professor in the Shepard Broad College of Law, will teach a three-credit course for law school students on baseball law using the casebook “Baseball and the Law: Cases and Materials,” which he co-authored with Louis Schiff, a Broward County court judge.
Jarvis said that, in the more than 200 law schools in the U.S., general sports law courses are common, but only 13 have ever had a course on baseball law.
Schiff currently teaches a baseball law course at the Mitchell Hamline School of Law in Minnesota. The materials that Schiff collected while teaching the course became the foundation for the casebook.
The book, published in December 2015, contains seven chapters covering 108 cases related to issues in baseball law, such as player-owner relations, discrimination, fan injuries, amateur leagues, antitrust law and media access.
Schiff said that the book is the first of its kind.
“The book is important because, for the first time, it takes this area of law and puts it into a digestible form that law students can use as a learning tool,” Schiff said.
According to Schiff, he and Jarvis wrote the book to give law schools the opportunity to teach courses on baseball law, but sports writers, intense baseball fans and lawyers who love baseball are buying the book for their own enjoyment.
“We blended the traditional law school textbook with an encyclopedia of information regarding baseball law and lore,” Schiff said. “We tried to tell the story of the history of the game and the social history of the game.”
Jarvis and Schiff worked on the 1,040-page book for two and a half years.
“We both were big baseball fans growing up,” Jarvis said. “He was a New York Mets fan, and I was a New York Yankees fan, so, in a sense, we’ve been thinking about this book ever since we were kids, or at least since we went to law school.”
Schiff said that he and Jarvis tried to make the book as exhaustive as possible.
“We hope the fact that this book exists will mean colleges will want to teach this class and that professors will know that there’s a textbook out there that they can use,” Schiff said.
For more information about “Baseball and the Law,” visit law.nova.edu/jd-program/course-descriptions.html. To purchase “Baseball and the Law: Cases and Materials,” visit the NSU Bookstore or amazon.com.
Caption: Jarvis as the costumed mascot, Oliver Wendell Wolf, Esq., whom he created.
Photo Credit: B. Jarvis
