Legal Issues in Professional BasketBall

       The ink is not yet dry on our Year of the Book campaign (soon there will be videos) and already another member of our faculty has presented me with an elegant new volume.  This is Legal Issues in Professional Basketball edited by our own Zephaniah Swift Professor of Law, Lew Kurlantzick and published by W.B. Sheridan Law Publishers, an imprint of Academica Press. 

      Lew penned the introduction (pp. 1-60) as well as Chapter VI -- An International Dimension: Player Movement, the NBA-FIBA Agreement, and Foreign League Limitations on American Players.(pp. 249-329). Other contributors are New England School of Law Professor Russ VerSteeg (Technology and Legal Issues in Professional Basketball);  Boston College Emeritus Professor Robert C. Berry (Labor Relations in the NBA: Beyond Words and into the Practice); Gonzaga Law Professor James R. McCurdy (Thunder on the Road from Seattle to Oklahoma City: Moving from NOPA [no opportunity for potential agreement]  to ZOPA [zone of potential agreement] in the NBA); and Wyoming law professor Jacquelyn L. Bridgeman ("We Got Next": The Once and Future WNBA).   This book is the second in a series that follows on Lew's earlier work, Legal Issues in Professional Baseball and will be of great interest to our students who have been raised in a world where professional sports have always been big business.

       With ESPN expanding just down the road, the success of our own men's and women's teams and the recent victory of the Dallas Mavericks, the release could hardly be more timely.  Congratulations Lew!   JP