Sam Ehrlich, an assistant professor in the Department of Management, recently filed an amicus brief with the U.S. Supreme Court based on his findings in his paper “A Three-Tiered Circuit Split: Why the Supreme Court Needs to Take Alston v. NCAA.”
Ehrlich wrote the paper to urge the U.S. Supreme Court to grant review on NCAA v. Alston, a pending antitrust case by a group of current and former college athletes against the NCAA based on allegations that the NCAA has illegally fixed the athletes’ education-based compensation
“In my study, I used mixed-methods citation network analysis to confirm and expand on the NCAA’s arguments that there is a circuit split where different appellate courts have treated NCAA amateurism rules differently under the antitrust laws,” he explains. “I find that there is a great deal of confusion between the courts as to how to apply antitrust law to NCAA amateurism rules, and argue that this confusion needs to be resolved by the Supreme Court. However, I differ from the NCAA’s approach where I argue that the Ninth Circuit’s decision in the appealed Alston case was the correct approach, as it conforms with the Supreme Court’s longtime preference against implied antitrust immunity without Congressional action.”
Ehrlich presented the paper at the Academy of Legal Studies in Business 2020 Annual Conference, which was held virtually in August 2020. The paper currently is under peer review for publication.