Show Summary Details

Page of

PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com). © Oxford University Press, 2018. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a title in Oxford Handbooks Online for personal use (for details see Privacy Policy and Legal Notice).

date: 25 February 2021

Abstract and Keywords

Competition law generally requires competitors who agree on restraints of trade to justify their agreements as procompetitive when market forces create the potential for consumer exploitation. This analysis, known as the Rule of Reason (from its common law origins), does not apply to internal agreements within a single firm. The U.S. Supreme Court has characterized sports league policies as agreements among club owners who control the league, rather than unilateral decisions of a single entity. Opponents of the application of the Rule of Reason continue to seek doctrinal shields against judicial review of anticompetitive sports rules, and this chapter explains why such an approach is unsound competition policy.

Keywords: antitrust, competition policy, sports leagues, sports governance, single entity, Rule of Reason

Stephen F. Ross

Stephen F. Ross is Professor of Law and Executive Director of the Center for the Study of Sports in Society at The Pennsylvania State University.

Access to the complete content on Oxford Handbooks Online requires a subscription or purchase. Public users are able to search the site and view the abstracts and keywords for each book and chapter without a subscription.

Please subscribe or login to access full text content.

If you have purchased a print title that contains an access token, please see the token for information about how to register your code.

For questions on access or troubleshooting, please check our FAQs, and if you can''t find the answer there, please contact us.