Partner Carl Hittinger and Counsel Julian Perlman authored an article that was published on June 25, 2021, in The Legal Intelligencer. The commentary, “U.S. Supreme Court Reins in the NCAA in Narrow Ruling,” examined the court’s decision in NCAA v. Alston, an antitrust case that tested the limits on the NCAA’s power to cap compensation to college athletes. Hittinger and Perlman offered in-depth analysis on how the majority reached its unanimous opinion, which was written by Justice Neil Gorsuch. “It is inescapable, when reading the court’s opinion, that the fundamental dilemma presented to the court by the NCAA was that the defining feature of its product, amateurism, was the very anticompetitive conduct at issue. There simply was no justifying the suppression of wages in a labor market, much less a circular one,” they wrote.
Hittinger and Perlman noted that while the opinion “leaves open many more issues than it resolves,” Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s “blistering” concurring opinion, “which can only be called a rallying cry for student-athletes, eliminates any need to speculate, and makes clear that the NCAA compensation rules left in place are extremely vulnerable to antitrust challenge.”
Read the article.