The Death of Civil Justice: It Was a Good Run, 900 years

Opening panel at Anglia Ruskin University Sports Law 2016: Leonardo Valladares Pacheco de Oliveira, Ian Blackshaw, Tom Serby, Andrew Smith, and Antoine Duval

Last week I was privileged to attend a tremendous one-day Sports Law program at Anglia Ruskin University in Cambridge, UK, focusing on the question, “the future of ‘the legal autonomy’ of sport.”  Experts in the academy and in practice gave timely and informative commentary on contemporary sport governance from perspectives of contract law, politics, and dispute resolution. 

Though justifiably through the lens of sport, the program raised a broader and important question concerning the future of civil justice.  Dispute resolution in international sport today is the province of the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS), in Lausanne, Switzerland, under the very loose supervision of the Swiss Federal Tribunal.  CAS has a complicated relationship with international sport governance organizations such as the IOC and FIFA.  Certainly the court is not their stooge.  At the same time, through the magic of contract law, the mandatory use of the arbitration system carries down through the echelons of world sport from the IOC to the national sporting federation, and all the way to the athlete.

Transnational sport governing bodies, such as the IOC and FIFA, want their disputes handled in this single channel, because it renders them largely immune to oversight by the democratic instrumentalities of the world’s governments, especially the courts.  The transnationals have legitimate and less legitimate motivations.  They fairly worry about potential liability in multitudinous courts, each national judiciary applying its unique domestic law anchored in local priorities and prejudices.  Bypassing national legal systems, the transnationals can conserve resources for objectives in the public interest, such as sport for development and peace, and the promotion of human health and competitive achievement.  The logic supporting consolidation of international dispute resolution under one supra-national banner is the same by which the U.S. Constitution places interstate commercial disputes in U.S. federal courts, supervening the potential vagaries and favoritisms of the states.

But international arbitration has its dark side—in fact, nearly literally, as CAS operates in the opacity that typically surrounds arbitration.  Observers, including journalists and NGO watchdogs, grow frustrated and skeptical, as secrecy breeds unfairness and unaccountability.  This problem is the same that has generated angst within the United States over the “secret justice” system that has so thoroughly superseded the civil trial—see the excellent work of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press in its Secret Justice series, linked from here. 

Further threatening the integrity of these proceedings, the contracts that bind parties to arbitration, and are then construed in arbitration, generally are adhesion contracts: drawn up by the transnationals themselves, weighted to their favor, and presented as fait accompli to young athletes with Olympic gold medals dancing in their dreams.  Barrister Andrew Smith, Matrix Chambers, conceded that these contracts are not meaningfully negotiated.  Their acceptance at the international level apparently marks the same phenomenon that has been documented with alarm, but as yet no serious reform, at the consumer level within the United States in works such as Nancy Kim’s Wrap Contracts and Margaret Jane Radin’s Boilerplate.

Upon my inquiry, Smith pointed out that for many reasons, athletes, given the choice, would themselves prefer arbitration to redress in the courts.  A plaintiff often desires secrecy as much as a defendant.  An expert arbiter might be more likely than a civil court to reach a conclusion that recognizes the nuances of divided merits, rather than erring in favor of dismissal as against the plaintiff’s burden of proof.  Though affordable representation for claimants has been a problem for the CAS system, organized arbitration systems still do a better job looking out for claimant’s access to representation than the usual civil court.  And most important to potential litigants are the time and costs of civil justice, often prohibitive deterrents that make faster and cheaper arbitration more appealing.

Nevertheless, panelists agreed that for the arbitration system to work fairness, stakeholders including athletes must take part in developing the process.  Conference organizer Tom Serby of Anglia Law School emphasized the need for democratization of sport governing bodies.  Smith said that organization of athletes into representative bodies is essential, noting with approval that “the United States is farther along with collective bargaining.”

With disparate levels of enthusiasm for the merits of judicial abstention, three speakers—Serby; Antoine Duval of the Asser Institute,Den Haag; and Simon Boyes of the Centre for Sports Law atNottingham Law School—all opined that national courts have been generously deferential to private dispute resolution in international jurisdiction.  Quotes from the iconic British jurist Lord Denning were offered both for and against the position.  Denning on the one hand bemoaned the courts’ relative lack of expertise in matters of private regulation, respecting the brightly formalist lines of conserved judicial power.  On the other hand, he declared, as quoted in Baker v. Jones, [1954] 1 W.L.R. 1005, “‘If parties should seek, by agreement, to take the law out of the hands of the courts and put it into the hands of a private tribunal, without any recourse at all to the courts in case of error of law, then the agreement is to that extent contrary to public policy and void.’”  Duval and Boyes mapped the ground between, where court intervention seems justified.  Boyes boiled down viable grounds to the protection of natural justice, human rights, and free competition and trade.

Incidentally the same autonomy question was taken up in similar dichotomy by Judge Richard Matsch and then the Tenth Circuit in Hackbart v. Cincinnati Bengals, Inc., 435 F. Supp. 352 (D. Colo. 1977), rev’d & remanded, 601 F.2d 516 (10th Cir. 1979).  Asked to intervene after an on-field altercation, Judge Matsch opined, on the “larger question” of “the business of professional football” and “the business of the courts,” that “the courts are not well suited” to allocate fault or probe causation.  For fear of excessive litigation and inconsistent rulings, any “government involvement” in the “self-regulated industry” of professional football was, in Matsch’s view, “best considered by the legislative branch”—Denning-like formalism.  Instead applying the law of recklessness to the dispute at hand, the Tenth Circuit disagreed.  Persuasive was the oft quoted reasoning of the Illinois Appellate Court in Nabozny v. Barnhill, 334 N.E.2d 258, 260—if a decision about teen athletes playing that other kind of football—that “some of the restraints of civilization must accompany every athlete onto the playing field.”

Well intentioned aspirations for meaningful athlete-as-stakeholder involvement and debate about the selective intervention of courts all gloss over the broader and more troubling trend of public, civil justice eclipsed by the private sphere.  I confess that what troubled me most about the sports lawyers’ commentaries on arbitration and autonomy was a problem beyond the scope of their charge: the disappearance of civil justice in our society at large.

Plenty has been written at the national level about vanishing civil justice and the rise of private dispute resolution.  But as the realities of globalization decree that every dispute becomes an international one—whether a youthful athlete against an international federation, or a homeowner against a floorboard maker—it it seems that public civil justice is dying.  Blind deference to adhesion contracts is hastening the trend, and the courts seem plenty eager to stand by and cede power.  They purport to further the laudable aims of deference to experts or freedom of contract.  But courts have always been in the business of second-guessing professed experts, and the contemporary commercial contract is hardly a product of free choices.

Dystopian science fiction in popular culture has in recent years flourished upon an obsession with burgeoning social angst over the corporatization of public life.  In 2013 and 2014, the Canadian TV series Continuum traced the personal struggle of an anti-terrorism agent who came to doubt the virtue of the corporate-dominated future she was sent back in time to protect.  Themes of abusive corporate supremacy and submissive, corrupted government dominate the visions of current hits, such as Killjoys and The Expanse, the latter based on the novels of James S.A. Corey.  The next year will see the premieres of Incorporated, a dark Matt Damon-Ben Affleck project, and the plainly titled Dystopia, which imagines 2037: “Governments are now powerless puppets for the biggest corporations.”

Western democracy has 900 years of experience developing a public system of civil justice to patrol the boundaries of right and wrong among us.  We ought not jettison that system so readily, nor so casually.  We ought not capitulate to the conveniences of globalization, nor certainly to the burdens of transaction costs.  Would that we spend more time and energy trying to fix the public system that we have rather than ushering it into the past and replacing it with the corporatized private justice of our nightmares.

“A Fair Shake for the Sheikh,” or “Cut Qatar Some Slack”: On World Cup 2022

My photo at a Qatar Stars League double header in March 2016: Empty stands tell the tale of native public interest in football.  However, Prof. Susan Dun reported that populous foreign laborers do pack matches for the leagues they follow: another piece of the untold story in Qatar.

I was just in Oxford, UK, for “Sport 5.”  (The full name of the conference, sponsored by Inter-Disciplinary.Net, is in the previous post about my contribution there.)  I tweeted some of the highlights of Sport 5 (link to Twitter from the ribbon atop this page, Sept. 13-15, 2016).  I want to share a bit more about one paper at Sport 5 that stood out for its unconventional thesis.  The paper came from this year’s conference coordinator, Professor Susan Dun, a communication scholar at Northwestern University in Qatar.

I don’t want to steal Dun’s thunder or evidence, so I’ll give only cursory treatment to her thesis and outline three rationales that I found persuasive.  My own impressions have mixed with recollection, so blame me for any misstatements.

In essence, Dun posited that however much Qatar deserves condemnation for corrupt dealings with FIFA (see generally Blake & Calvert’s The Ugly Game), the ills of the kafala labor system, or dreams of air-conditioned desert stadiums, the regime is not getting a fully fair shake in global perception.  She made a compelling case, and activists, journalists, and scholars investigating the social and economic implications of the upcoming World Cups in Russia 2018 and Qatar 2022—myself included—should take note.

First, Dun placed the Qatari bid for 2022 in the context of Qatar’s ambitious struggle for political legitimacy through soft-power sport.  In its rush onto the world stage, Qatar was not ready for intense scrutiny and scathing criticism that accompanied the award (and then was amplified by the FIFA corruption fiasco, pointed out David Storey of the University of Worcester, who, by the way, presented a fascinating paper on the GAA).  Within Qatar, criticism of Al Thani leadership is not just legally problematic, but socially taboo.  So Qataris were utterly ill equipped to respond to an external public relations crisis in a way that would have seemed natural to Western observers—with press conferences, collaborative inquiries, and affirmative information dissemination.  Instead Qatar took an outmoded defend-or-deny stance, which only bloodied the waters.

Second, Dun explained that Qatar actually implemented a great many reforms to redress exposed deficiencies, for example, illegalizing passport retention and improving living conditions for foreign laborers.  The communications failure has meant that reform stories have not gotten much play.  Meanwhile, reform has been slowed by understandable challenges.  Employers might still seize passports.  Wrangling the middlemen is a laborious process in part because rapidly developed Qatar lacks regulatory and enforcement mechanisms that Westerners take for granted in key areas, such as workplace safety and banking.  Communications failure again means that these impediments are not explained.  Reform is necessarily incremental, but unresolved problems on the ground are misconstrued to signal government indifference, if not malice.

Third, Dun documented a media affection for criticism of Qatar.  In part the penchant seems driven by ignorance.  Journalists, bloggers, et al., tend not to be familiar with Qatar, so are more likely to republish judgmental commentary without critical analysis for fairness and accuracy.  I suspect that hostility toward a wealthy Islamic state in the post-9/11 era also plays a role.  Again, communications failure exaggerates the problem.  Dun gave evidence that even Russia is more likely than Qatar to get a fair shake in media coverage.  I can attest that in my own research, I only recently read about changes in Russian labor law—allegations not unlike those that have plagued Qatar for years—to hasten World Cup infrastructure development at the expense of worker rights.  (See Martin Müller, How Mega-Events Capture Their Hosts: Event Seizure and the World Cup 2018 in Russia, Urban Geography, 2015, doi).

Dun got push-back in discussion with Sport 5 attendees, but she held firm.  To be clear, Dun makes no motion whatever to justify human rights abuses; quite the contrary.  She simply laments that the whole story of Qatar's reform is not being told.  It would be a mistake to pull the World Cup from Qatar, she says, because there are desirable reforms occurring that should not be undermined.  (This is happily consistent with Benavides and my extension in World Cup Dreaming of Jeremiah Ho's incrementalist theory).  She makes that case well enough that those of us who fancy ourselves objective observers should pay attention.

The World Cup of Human Rights?

I prepared this map for the Inter-Disciplinary.Net conference, Sport: Sport Places, Money, and Politics, the 5th global meeting of the Sport Project: Probing the Boundaries, this week at Mansfield College, Oxford. The map shows the movement of the FIFA Men's World Cup since the United States in 1994, illustrating FIFA's deliberate campaign to globalize the tournament and the sport.

In my talk yesterday, I traced the marriage of FIFA and human rights from Football for Hope investments in World Cup 2010 South Africa, to World Cup 2014 Brazil; on to World Cup 2018 Russia and World Cup 2022 Qatar; and at last, to a World Cup 2026 that might embrace the U.N. Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights in the manner proposed by Professor Ruggie.

Daunting challenges are presented with respect to international legal norms on housing, labor, sexual identity, racism and equality, due process and criminal punishment, and religious and expressive freedom. FIFA's extreme demands on host countries for infrastructure development, commercial protectionism, and security have made tournament hosting more easily the province of authoritarian regimes than of Western-style democracies, and that tendency works at cross-purposes with the incorporation of human rights norms in the Western legal tradition.

Burning of the Bodleian

Guide Fiona in an oak-paneled room of the ground-level, former Divinity School at Oxford University's main building of the Bodleian Libraries.  Photos are not permitted on the Humfrey Library level, discussed in this post and featured in Harry Potter's Hogwarts.

Today I had the extraordinary experience of touring the main, historic building of the Bodleian Libraries at Oxford University, UK.  Here's some of the intriguing and tragic history shared by my capable guide, Fiona (a knowledgeable academic, whom I wish I could identify more precisely; Fiona, get in touch if you read this, and I shall give you due credit).

To get the most important matter out of the way at the top: Yes, this is the place were books literally were flying about the room at Harry Potter's Hogwarts.  Fiona told a couple of good stories about filming in the library, which was permitted only during, and ran fully throughout, nighttime closing hours, 7-7.  Sometimes filming had to be stopped on Harry Potter if sound booms got too close to the ceiling beams, or lights raised the temperature too much for the books' safety. On another occasion, Fiona asked a bearded guy, authorized to case the library, why?, and he answered, "For the next Transformers movie."  Only later did she realize she had spoken with Steven Spielberg.  She still wasn't sure why the library would make an apt set for Transformers.

So I'll skip the fascinating mechanics and history of care for the books--let Fiona have her IP, and you should take the tour, at least the 60-minute version, yourself--and mention just one arresting, contemporary fact: Fiona said it takes on average £20,000 pounds to scan one book from the historical collection.  So feel welcome to donate in support of the effort.  What's here that's worth such extravagant effort?  Fiona casually mentioned the presence of an original Johnson dictionary among the holdings.

In the 15th century--the dawn of the printing press, remember--Fiona said, one book cost about as much as a small car today.  The University library owned the princely sum of 20 books. In the 16th century, Oxford got a massive donation of books from Duke Humfrey (Humphrey of Lancaster, first Duke of Gloucester), but had no place to put them.  So the library asked for some additional money from Humfrey to build the structure I was in today (but just the second floor; the Divinity School was on the ground floor and today is part of the halls still used for Convocation; it was and remains--with modern climate controls precluded in the name of historic building preservation--unwise to store books on the ground level because of the risk of rat and insect infestations).

Today if someone who has the proper credentials wants to see a book from this old collection, he or she must request it in advance, and then is given a date, time, and place to view the book.  The book is then transported via underground tunnel across Broad Street to the more recent Watson Library (opened originally 1940s, renovated and reopened 2015), to meet its reader at the appointed time and station.

Yet these are not the original books of the 15th century.  In the 16th century, the entire contents of the library was (believed) burned in the name of the Reformation.  You can still see where a stone cross was removed from the wall.  The stained glass windows, featuring Catholic iconography, were destroyed and today still are just plain clear glass.  Some 40 or 50 (more?, it is suspected) books are known to have survived the burning, besides pages here and there (some lathered with butter, as they apparently were recycled by fishmongers to wrap their wares).  The library has managed to buy back five--5! (or just three, Wikipedia says).

Thomas Bodley came around to restore the library in the late 16th, early 17th centuries--after 50 years of post-Reformation neglect that left ceilings open to the elements--and the library/libraries took his name.  But that's another story for a longer tour....

"Readers" at the Bodleian--such as, once upon a time, JRR Tolkein--have always been compelled to recite aloud the library's pledge, formerly in Latin and now, thankfully, in English.  At the shop, I bought the tin sign for my law-librarian wife to adorn her workplace, and perhaps demand likewise of patrons eager to explore special collections:

I hereby undertake not to remove from the Library, or to mark, deface, or injure in any way, any volume, document, or other object belonging to it or in its custody; not to bring into the Library or kindle therein any fire or flame, and not to smoke in the Library; and I promise to obey all rules of the Library.

See, fire, such as the burning of candles even for the innocent purpose of generating reading light, always and still poses a grave threat to the library.  But that threat is second, Fiona said, to the ravages of water, which might be needed to put out a fire.  Mold begets hungry bugs, who don't stop when they reach paper.  Not even bottled H2O is permitted to today's readers, who must exit the library to slake their thirst.

Shhhhh!  Silence in the stacks, please.

Of turds and torts

<Warning: Vulgar language ahead!>

Lately I have been doing research on "bad language" in anticipation of the Lenny Bruce conference that will dedicate his archive to Brandeis University libraries (see Comedy and the Constitution, and join us on October 27-28!).  A couple of sources have taught me that the vulgar word "turd" shares an origin with the legal term "tort."  As explained by Professor Geoffrey Hughes in his Encyclopedia of Swearing (2006), page 467:

TURD. This ancient term has followed the same basic semantic route historically as shit, being first recorded in Anglo-Saxon times in a plain literal sense, leading to various metaphorical extensions of coarse abuse from the medieval period onward.  Etymologically the word turns out to be a distant relative of legal tort, both rooted in the concept of being twisted or crooked.

So the next time I'm told, "You're full of shit," I will say, "Why, thank you.  I am indeed a torts professor."

Now that's a savory re-tort.

SOL in Mass.

The Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court adopted the continuing treatment exception to the state medmal limitations period (three years) and reasonable discovery rule in Parr v. Rosenthal, published this week, http://www.mass.gov/courts/docs/sjc/reporter-of-decisions/new-opinions/12014.pdf.  The opinion offers a worthwhile review of the language and standards of Masschusetts common law interpretation of the statutory limitations periods.

Bonus tracks include (1) the problem of a minor plaintiff; (2) interaction with statutes of repose; (3) role of the jury in fact-finding; and (4) a dissent (from p. 37) that doesn't necessarily disagree with the rationale but thinks the upset to settled common law invaded the policy-making prerogative of the legislature.

Saliently for the litigants, the Court ruled that the limitations period ran despite operation of the continuing treatment doctrine, because the doctrine ceased to operate when the defending physician left the treatment team.

(Cross-posted to Obligations Discussion Group.)