The National Labor Relations Board V. Northwestern University: Cultivating a New Era for Taxing Qualified Scholarships (original) (raw)
Related papers
NCAA Amateurism as an Anticompetitive Tying Restraint
Antitrust Bulletin, 2019
Antitrust litigation against the NCAA has focused on its members' collusive restraint on athlete compensation at levels below marginal revenue product. The recent O'Bannon v. NCAA and In Re NCAA Grant-in-Aid Cap Antitrust Litigation have both prescribed a relevant market for "college education" where schools compete for athlete labor by offering tuition and fee or cost-of-attendance offsets. This article argues that this unitary definition conflates two separate products, academic education and athletic participation, that NCAA members offer as a bundled tie. The NCAA has mandated purchase of the tied product, academic education, as a prerequisite for access to intercollegiate athletics participation, the tying product. Paradoxically, the NCAA has then argued that this bundled tie, which this article argues violates the Supreme Court's three-pronged 'quasi' per-se rule prohibiting tying arrangements, represents a claimed 'pro-competitive justification' by integrating athletics and academics. This article offers evidence that this tying arrangement serves no legitimate pro-competitive purpose under the NCAA model of amateurism. Rather, it extracts consumer surplus, enhances dominant cartel members' market power, and forecloses competition not only from non-members but also from smaller NCAA member-schools. As such, the NCAA model of amateurism violates antitrust law governing tying arrangements and should be enjoined.
The Antitrust Bulletin, 2017
Faced with significant antitrust scrutiny, particularly from ongoing cases, the NCAA has sought to justify, under the rule of reason, the competitive restrictions its collegiate model of amateurism imposes by claiming procompetitive benefits. This article examines the NCAA's arguments and presents five findings: (1) the procompetitive justifications that the NCAA has offered for its restraint on athlete payments have little, if any, economic merit and do not justify the consumer injury resulting from the restraint; (2) absent the restraint, the minimum amount public P5 conference schools alone could have paid athletes is approximately $5.2 billion between 2003–2004 and 2014–2015, approximately two-thirds of which would have been used to compensate football and men's basketball players, indicating that the consumer injury resulting from the NCAA's restraint on trade has caused significant antitrust damages; (3) contrary to the NCAA's claims, empirical and documentary evidence demonstrates that directly compensating FBS/D1 athletes would not result in decreased consumer demand; (4) " competitive balance, " when analyzed in an antitrust setting, does not support the NCAA's claims; and (5) evidence, including the over one million documents released from the academic/athletic fraud investigation at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, demonstrates significant consumer injury associated with the integration of academics and amateur revenue sport athletics. Such findings stand in direct opposition to the NCAA's claim of procompetitive benefits from integrating athletics and academics under its amateur model.
The NCAA’s purported philosophical justifications for its ‘‘Collegiate Model of Athletics’’ are embedded within its seven stated ‘‘Core Values’’ and ‘‘Principles’’, which are based on a distribution principle of strict, or radical, equality in which it is believed societal benefit or the ‘‘greater good’’ is achieved if universities can lawfully conspire to compensate all athletes at the same level. From this theoretical perspective, the authors scrutinize two ethical frameworks most often asserted by the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) to justify exploitation of profit-athletes in the revenue-generating sports of Football Bowl Subdivision (FBS) football and Division I men’s basketball: Classical Utilitarianism and Paternalism. From an analysis of several court rulings over the past 40 years involving challenges to the NCAA’s ‘‘amateurism’’ principles, the authors found, in rulings favoring the NCAA, the judges implicitly supported their decisions utilizing the NCAA’s utilitarian and paternalistic justifications for its Collegiate Model of Athletics. They recommend courts should balance considerations of utilitarianism and paternalism against normative principles of honesty, harm, autonomy, justice, and an adult individual’s fundamental right to maximize economic value and selfworth free of conspiratorial restraints.
The NCAA is the largest and most well-known of four independent organizations that regulate intercollegiate athletics and part of its self governance structure is its membershipapproved enforcement and infractions process used for assessing penalties for violation of the association's bylaws. This process has often been criticized in the media, by the NCAA members themselves, and in the federal and state court system. One of the primary criticisms of the NCAA and its administrative law process has been that it does not provide any due process and procedural protection for those accused of NCAA rules violations. This article explores the history of the NCAA and the enforcement and infractions process, the many legal and legislative challenges to the process, and a template for reform to make the system impartial for all stakeholders involved. KEYWORDS National Collegiate Athletic Association-due process-membership-legislation 'The National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) is a voluntary organization through which the nation's colleges and universities govern their athletics programs. It comprises more than 1,250 institutions, conferences, organizations and individuals committed to the best interests, education and athletics participation of athletes' (NCAA, 2007b, para. 1). As a voluntary membership organization, the NCAA proposes, passes, and enforces its own rules and regulations governing topics ranging from academics to recruiting. In 2006 the NCAA conducted 88 championships, in three divisions, for 23 sports and over 375,000 college athletes (NCAA, 2007c, para 1). 1 Although the NCAA is often seen as an organization that primarily conducts and markets intercollegiate athletic competition, it also acts as an investigative and enforcement agency. Some observers perceive the enactment and enforcement of NCAA regulations as solely originating from the NCAA offices (Chabot, 2004; Crowley, 2007). However, the NCAA Website notes, ' The entire organization [is] comprised of members and staff. [I]t is actually a bottom-up organization in which the members rule the Association' (NCAA, 2007d, para. 4). Although the NCAA office initiates, stimulates, and alters intercollegiate athletics by proposing, passing, and enforcing rules designed to protect the integrity of the sports experience, the member schools (primarily through their presidents' votes) ultimately determine NCAA policy (Due Process and the NCAA, 2004a). These membership-developed rules are published in each division's bylaws and the NCAA Manual. The extensive nature of these rules is evidenced by the size of the NCAA's
Criminology & Public Policy, 2012
A l b e r t a C ullen, Latessa, and Jonson (2012, this issue) analyzed data from a survey administered to a random sample of football and men's basketball players at NCAA Division I-A institutions in 1994. The survey data are unique and provide detailed information about the behavior and motivations of NCAA student-athletes in the two sports that generate the largest revenues, and the lion's share of media attention, in U.S. intercollegiate athletics. Scandals in NCAA Division I-A athletic programs are standard headline fodder, so any reasoned, carefully performed research on the topic of violations and the motivations behind them represents an important alternative to one-off ex post investigations of "scandals" and sensational media reports designed to sell newspapers and increase television viewership.