ABSTRACT
Competitive sport is a matter of identity, with rules about who gets to compete and therefore who gets rewarded through medals, public recognition, sponsorship and other benefits. Identity in sport is as much a matter of who makes the rules, how and for whose benefit rather than merely who plays or does not play by the rules, in that it resembles what we see in civil and criminal law, and in the theorisation by Hart that understands law as a matter of rules about rules: rules in a game where the stakes may be higher than suspension from a competition or denial of product endorsement opportunities. This chapter construes professional and quasi-professional sport (such as the Olympics) in terms of rules about identity. It suggests that the creation, subversion and policing of identity in sport through the articulation and implementation of rules results in a jurisprudence that offers insights about sports law per se and about the nature of identity as an artefact in law, something that can be understood through lenses provided by theorists such as H.L.A. Hart, Alan Gewirth and Martha Nussbaum.
