Antitrust, Professional Sports, and the Public Interest

In a number of important cases, antitrust tribunals have intervened in ways that have significantly affected how professional sports are conducted in the United States. This article focuses on 10 important decisions where the courts ruled against sports leagues and will consider whether the public would have been better off with or without antitrust intervention. It is concluded that, in each of these cases, the private ordering challenged by antitrust litigation was not in the public interest. Although in many of the cases an optimal result would be some middle ground between the status quo and the demands of the antitrust plaintiff, in all cases, an optimal result was encouraged or facilitated by intervention.