Scott Sternberg

I’ve been recently criticizing judges for making jokes in serious cases. Often folks ask me: well when is it ok? A case about a fight between two premium tequila brands is where it’s ok.

“You got a best friend? Is he smarter than you? Would you trust him with your life? That's your chief of staff.”

Happy 60th birthday to the New Orleans Saints. On Nov. 1, 1966, Commissioner Pete Rozelle awarded the NFL's 16th franchise to the state of Louisiana and city of New Orleans. All Saints Day, indeed.

At first I thought how reckless is it for Ole Miss to call a fake punt deep in their own territory. But no, you can see the moment the punter realized Texas had no defenders on the right side of the field and he could go for a stroll.

A Florida man was found dead in his home during a welfare check in July 2022. Weeks later, one of the officers who discovered his body moved into the home and spent years impersonating him, according to investigators. nbcnews.com/news/us-news/off…

HARVARD WINS. HARVARD WINS. HARVARD WINS. #GoCrimson

The legal proceeding is of importance - LSU aside - as the judicial decision may shape the future of any conference-wide governance model, determining if a league can enforce its rules on member schools. It is imperative to establish precedent. bit.ly/4xRdO3O

Follow this guy @mckenzielaw if you're interested in the @SEC v. @LSUfootball drama. Apparently he didn't just fall off a turnip truck in Ferriday.

The combo we didn't know we needed 🐯 Lane Kiffin, Livvy Dunne and Theo Von have arrived for Clemson-LSU 🔥

The more I work my way through this, the more I think that the SEC's complaint is subject to dismissal. The federal jurisdiction is being manufactured as a First Amendment problem where there is none. Who is forcing any association with LSU? There is no Ken Paxton letter like we had with the Big 12. A state officer threatening a conference with antitrust liability for exercising its associational rights is a First Amendment injury. I get that. That letter manufactured the controversy and the federal jurisdiction. But LSU recruiting football players? Lane Kiffin putting them at practice? LSU threatening to play them? That is precisely what the complaint offers as the coercion. SEC Compl. ¶ 70. Two of those are speech and one is a football practice. The complaint then has to insist that the defendants went "beyond mere public statements," which tells you the drafters saw the problem coming. Compl. ¶ 75. All of it may be brazen. It may violate the SEC's bylaws. It may constitute an anticipatory breach of the governing compact. But none of those things, without considerably more, explains how Louisiana has used sovereign power to compel the SEC to associate with anybody. There is an antecedent problem too: What is the constitutionally protected association being impaired? Dale was an expressive-association case, and the complaint leans on it hard. See Compl. ¶¶ 55, 66, 70. But the First Amendment does not create a generalized right for every private organization to avoid dealing with people it dislikes. The SEC is principally an athletic and commercial joint venture, and its own pleading says so, complaining of harm to its brand and its media partnerships. The complaint needs to explain why LSU rostering a football player infringes a protected expressive association rather than simply violates the rules of the league. And notice what is actually alleged. Not forced association with a member. Forced association with conduct. Dale protects against compelled membership. Being adjacent to conduct you disapprove of is a different thing, and no case the SEC cites makes it a constitutional injury. Rumsfeld v. FAIR, 547 U.S. 47 (2006), forecloses most of what is left. (Citation to cases in a complaint is disfavored, but note that a pleading with room for Roberts, Dale, Wooley, and Barnette somehow found none for FAIR.) The Court rejected an expressive-association claim even where federal law required law schools to permit military recruiters onto campus, reasoning that recruiters were outsiders who came to hire students rather than to join anyone's expressive association. Id. at 68-70. Compelled interaction is not compelled expressive association. If a genuine federal mandate backed by the loss of every federal dollar does not state that claim, a member's breach of a private bylaw cannot. And here nobody mandated anything. Which leaves the SEC on a fork of its own making. If the objectionable association is with the players, FAIR controls, because they are outsiders and not SEC members at all. Compl. ¶ 12. If it is with LSU, then this is a member breaching an agreement it signed, and Dale has never supplied a cause of action for that. Then comes Section 1983. Yes, LSU officials are state actors. Agreed. That gets you halfway. Section 1983 requires state action and the deprivation of a federal right. The complaint does a reasonably good job identifying Louisiana officials. It does a much less persuasive job identifying what those officials have done with the sovereign power of Louisiana that deprives the SEC of a constitutional right. Recruiting a tight end is not an exercise of sovereign authority. The assertion that "[e]ach Defendant is a 'person' within the meaning of Section 1983" is simply wrong. Compl. ¶ 69. LSU and its Board are arms of the State of Louisiana, and arms of a State are not persons at all under Section 1983. That has been the law for 37 years. Will v. Michigan Dep't of State Police, 491 U.S. 58 (1989). LSU does not become a statutory person by ipse dixit. The official-capacity defendants survive, but a complaint that gets the elementary point wrong as to two of five defendants does not inspire confidence in the rest. The invocation of Ex parte Young also makes no sense. Ex parte Young exists to stop state officers from enforcing unconstitutional law. What law is at issue here? None. Ex Parte Young, probably the most inconsistently applied case of all time, is not a vehicle for enforcing a private association's bylaws. And the SEC's own allegations make the supposed compulsion harder to understand with every page. By its telling, the Conference can declare these players ineligible, sanction LSU, strip its championship recognition, bar it from conference events, withhold its revenue distributions, suspend it by a two-thirds vote, and ultimately expel it. All of that sits in Articles 3 and 4 of Exhibit A, attached to the complaint by the SEC. So the constitutional theory is that the SEC is being compelled to associate with an institution it voluntarily admitted, voluntarily retains, and possesses the contractual authority to expel?? Ultimately, it sounds like one hell of a conference-governance dispute. None of which changes my view of LSU and Kiffin. I am Team SEC on the merits. Conferences have to be able to define the product they offer. They can distinguish college football from professional football. They can establish eligibility rules and sanction members that seek unilateral competitive advantages by blowing through them. LSU apparently voted to reaffirm these rules and then, days later, decided Lane Kiffin could treat them as advisory. See Compl. ¶¶ 7, 45, 48, 51. LSU's conduct is outrageous. But outrageous conduct by a public university is not ipso facto a constitutional tort. The SEC has identified state actors, an impending violation of its rules, and a spectacular governance crisis. What it still needs to identify is the juridical alchemy by which all of that becomes compelled association under the First Amendment.

Name a better state

😂😂😂 and look, I could be wrong here, but I thought it was a non-frivolous hook . . .compelling an organizer to include unwanted participants can alter the event’s message. Suspect there are ways to distinguish

New from me: I obtained 31 NDAs signed by Jeff Landry's administration and other public officials for SpaceX. They had previously withheld them from my public records request, citing ongoing negotiations. See who signed: nola.com/news/business/louis…

Qualifying day is my favorite day for a reason. What's up, Livonia?! #laelex #lalege