ABSTRACT
While the previous chapter illustrated how sports bodies may seek to limit the courts’ opportunities to review their decisions, with varying degrees of success, it also illustrated that it is incredibly difficult for them to completely insulate themselves against the possibility of court review or oversight. Notwithstanding those bodies’ best endeavours in most jurisdictions the courts will have some power to review their decisions whether through powers granted by legislation which is specific to sports, domestic legal provisions of general application which cannot be ousted, or of the instruments of supra-national legal actors such as the European Union (McArdle, 2009; Kustec Lipicer and McArdle, 2012). The United States possesses both general and sports-specific state and federal laws with which sporting organisations are required to comply and which the courts can use to oversee their determinations. However, there is no single legislation or government agency with de jure or de facto oversight of all sporting entities and the way that the organisational structures of US sports developed during the twentieth century have ensured that control over particular sports – and particularly control over when there may be recourse to the courts, to arbitration or to other external forms of dispute resolution – is vested in organisations that have incredibly wide-ranging powers and whose decisions are very difficult to challenge whether they are operating in the professional, the collegiate or the elite amateur sporting sphere. How the structures of professional and college sports make their decisions difficult to challenge is discussed in other chapters. This chapter focuses on the structures of so-called ‘amateur’ sports, with particular regard to the role of the courts and arbitral bodies in overseeing determinations which impact upon Olympic eligibility.
