NSU Horizons Fall 2018

24 NSU HORIZONS Baseball's first commissioner laid the foundation for THE GAME's relationship with another American pastime-the law. I t took less than three hours for a jury to acquit eight Chicago White Sox players of conspiring to fix the 1919 World Series. It took less than one day after that verdict in 1921 for baseball Commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis to ban all eight men from baseball for life. Speaking on his first significant decision as Major League Baseball’s first commissioner, Landis declared, “regardless of the verdict of juries, no player who throws a ball game, no player who entertains proposals or promises to throw a game… will ever again play professional baseball.” Landis, a federal judge by profession, took the job only after extracting a promise from team owners giving the commissioner’s office absolute rule over the game. Landis wasted no time in establishing his authority. By enforcing that power and a strict set of rules to ensure the integrity of the game, Landis mirrored baseball after another deep-rooted American pastime — and one he was intimately familiar with — the law. Dating back 150 years, the shared journey of baseball and law inspired Baseball and the Law: Cases and Materials , a textbook for law school students. The text is coauthored by Broward County Court Judge Louis Schiff and Robert Jarvis, J.D., a professor at NSU’s Shepard Broad College of Law, where Jarvis teaches a course of the same name. “Baseball has been intertwined with law for as long as baseball has existed,” said Schiff, who is also an adjunct professor at Mitchell Hamline School of Law in St. Paul, Minnesota, where he teaches baseball and the law. “You can teach an entire law school curriculum using nothing but baseball cases. There are breach of contract cases, property cases, construction defect cases, formation of corporation BY KATHLEEN KERNICKY