Sports Law Degree

For Sports Nuts that Love Law

Sports law encompasses the legal issues facing amateur, professional and international sports areas. Sports law overlaps with labor law, contract law, antitrust law, and tort law. This particular specialization has developed quickly in the recent years with the growth of professional sports and increased scrutiny in this industry.

With a sports law degree, you would deal with labor issues of professional athletes, mainly contracts with sport’s owners. Common issues that arise include minimal salary, squad size, draft, salary cap as well as grounds for termination and suspension.

While contract negotiation is by far the most well known and common activity of sports lawyers, they do get involved in a number of different things. For example, as a sports lawyer you could be dealing with negligence law suits, medical malpractice by a team doctor, criminal acts of assault and battery as well as purposeful cause of bodily harm. Additionally, you could be dealing with trademarks, domain names and copyrights.

From the examples above, you can see that sports law really revolves around rules and regulations, commercial agreements such as formation of contracts, remedies and common problems, intellectual property rights such as copyrights, trade marks and database rights. Sports lawyers also advise individuals on key issues in contracts, termination and remedies, discrimination, player transfer and loan outs, endorsement agreements and sports personality management.

We all know about sports agents – but few of us know that these sport agents are actually lawyers, in majority. The main role of sports agents is negotiation of athlete’s contract. Agents usually do not work alone but are part of a firm of agents, such as the International Management Group. These firms have agents as well as lawyers who may work on other issues aside from contract, such as athlete endorsements.

Sports lawyers are also deeply involved in college sports. They deal with issues regarding recruiting athletes and athlete’s eligibility. All professional teams and leagues have attorneys working for them, thus becoming involved in sports law leads to many job opportunities.

Sports Law programs focus on developing skills in how to read, draft and understand contracts. Additional skills needed are negotiation, problem-solving and mediation. Sports law programs cover courses that offer a broad legal foundation such as corporate, labor, antitrust law, tort law, intellectual property rights in professional athletics, employment law as well as amateur sports law, sports law and society, sports industry legal and business practices and professional sports law.

Sport law is just one of the many specializations in the law field. If you are not sure what you want to specialize in check out joint law degree programs, employment law, entertainment law, patent law, business law, real estate law, environmental law, family law, health law and international law.

Can you get your sports law degree online? Absolutely – as there are many online universities offering online education programs. However, you must determine if an online degree programs is right for you. While there are many benefits to online law degree programs, there are some drawbacks as well. Do your research ahead of time so you don’t get stuck in a degree program that is not right for you.