Trial and Appeal
Radovich and Alioto brought suit under the Clayton Act, which allows private parties to seek damages from unfair business practices, against the NFL, all its member franchises, commissioner Bert Bell, the PCL (by then defunct) and its commissioner at the time, J. Rufus Klawans. He alleged he had been the victim of a group boycott intended to ruin the AAFC and sought $35,000 in damages. The defendants, primarily the NFL, argued in a pretrial motion that the antitrust exemption for baseball should apply equally to football, barring the lawsuit, and that even if it didn't, it should be dismissed for failure to state a cause of action.
The district court accepted those arguments, as did the Ninth Circuit. The latter distinguished football from boxing, which the Supreme Court had already denied the exemption, by noting that it and baseball were both team sports, unlike boxing.
Read more about this topic: Radovich V. National Football League
Famous quotes containing the words trial and, trial and/or appeal:
“Every political system is an accumulation of habits, customs, prejudices, and principles that have survived a long process of trial and error and of ceaseless response to changing circumstances. If the system works well on the whole, it is a lucky accident—the luckiest, indeed, that can befall a society.”
—Edward C. Banfield (b. 1916)
“In government offices which are sensitive to the vehemence and passion of mass sentiment public men have no sure tenure. They are in effect perpetual office seekers, always on trial for their political lives, always required to court their restless constituents.”
—Walter Lippmann (1889–1974)
“Royalty is a government in which the attention of the nation is concentrated on one person doing interesting actions. A Republic is a government in which that attention is divided between many, who are all doing uninteresting actions. Accordingly, so long as the human heart is strong and the human reason weak, Royalty will be strong because it appeals to diffused feeling, and Republics weak because they appeal to the understanding.”
—Walter Bagehot (1826–1877)