Pitch battles

While this book is aimed at an American audience, there are nonetheless subjects covered which are of wider interest.

Chapter 3, entitled ‘Breaking Barriers: Gender Equity and Title IX in Sports’, covers many of the legal aspects of the fight for equity and equality for female athletes. Even if US legislation is not applicable elsewhere, the principles and arguments discussed are universal. The chapter becomes somewhat confused, however, since the author does not rigorously separate sex and gender, and instead conflates quite distinct arguments. Categories such as weight, age, disability and performance-enhancing drugs have nothing to do with personal identity – one cannot ‘identify’ into or out of boxing weight classes, the Paralympics or senior-age tournaments. Some feminist academics argue that the same applies to the sex category. 

Other chapters of general interest include Chapter 4, on global sports governance, the Olympics and Paralympics; Chapter 7 on intellectual property and privacy; and Chapter 8 on managing risk and liability. Risk and liability in sport pose interesting conundrums concerning consent to injury on the field, or in training (the author cites one case of death by heatstroke during a training camp as a particularly vivid example). Why should a negligent or deliberate act be given a free legal pass because it occurs on the field as opposed to after the match? The author mentions concussion injuries (p251), which are much better understood now than when many sports were developed, with serious implications for organisers should long-term neurological damage be found to be significantly more common for players than the general population. 

Chapter 9 considers Data and AI, while the concluding Chapter 10 is concerned with ‘The Future of Sports: Legal, Ethical and Environmental Dimensions’. It shows how sport cannot remain a self-contained activity free from societal issues – CO₂ emissions from large-scale professional events, for example, threaten the long-term viability of some well-established international sporting events. 

This book features many intellectually stimulating points. 

James Wilson is the author of Court and Bowled: Tales of Cricket and the Law