• Fitness & Health
• Sport & Exercise Science
• Physical Education
• Strength & Conditioning
• Sports Medicine
• Sport Management
• Dance

Designing and conducting legal research in sport management

This is an excerpt from Research Methods and Design in Sport Management-3rd Edition by Damon P.S. Andrew,Paul M. Pedersen.

By Anita M. Moorman, JD, John Grady, JD, PhD

DESIGN AND IMPLEMENTATION

As with other types of research design, designing legal research in the field of sport management requires a clearly defined research plan. The researcher needs to conduct adequate preliminary research to identify the research problem or legal issue to be examined and to generate research questions. Otherwise, the researcher could spend countless hours reviewing court decisions, electronic databases, and journal articles with little to show for the effort. The following three phases represent a good approach to designing and conducting legal research in sport management: (1) identifying the research question, (2) organizing the research plan, and (3) writing the paper. These phases involve several nonlinear steps.

Identifying the Research Question

Identifying and defining the research question is by far the most important step in the research process. To define a research question, take the following steps: (a) identify the topic, issue, or current development that gives rise to the research question; (b) narrow down the general topic or issue to identify the legal issue; and (c) write the research question.

Identifying Current Legal Issues or Developments

To identify current issues or developments with legal implications, it is helpful to stay on top of industry developments by searching the current business and professional literature. If the issue or problem is not clearly identified and narrowly defined, you will find it difficult to focus your research sufficiently to produce meaningful results. Clearly defining the issue helps you discover keywords, phrases, and terms that may facilitate your research. Several good sources of information about recent developments in the sport industry are available. The Chronicle of Higher Education includes sections on college athletics that report recent educational, administrative, business, and legal developments. Several industry publications, such as Sports Business Daily and SportsBusiness Journal, also report on sport business and legal issues. As mentioned in the previous section, several sport law blogs are now available that regularly track emerging legal issues in sport. In addition, news outlets often report on developing trends and issues in the sport industry. Thus, from a single current development in the business of sport, numerous legal issues may emerge that can be further explored and analyzed using legal research tools and techniques.

For example, following University of Miami’s decision to cancel a football game scheduled at Arkansas State University due to travel concerns arising from Hurricane Irma in 2017, Arkansas State filed suit for breach of contract, claiming that the cancellation was not justified under the terms of the agreement and therefore Miami was liable for liquidated damages for the canceled game (“Arkansas State Sues Miami,” 2018). This single dispute may have much broader implications for the sport industry as extreme weather events become more disruptive to game schedules. The legal issues raised in the case may affect many game contract negotiations. Thus, this incident could form the basis for several legal research projects. In fact, Murfree and Moorman (2021) examined the cancellation of football games due to hurricanes and analyzed the inconsistent contract provisions in these game contracts for weather cancellations and other force majeure events. Force majeure events involve unforeseeable consequences that prevent fulfillment of the contract, such as a hurricane or other natural disaster. Their analysis of force majeure provisions in the contracts “revealed inconsistent definitions of force majeure events, a limited number of contracts containing specific weather-related force majeure language, and a range of force majeure events leading to the absence of a clear and consistent understanding of how extreme weather-related cancellations would impact the contractual relationships” (p. 123). The researchers then provided recommendations for how sport organizations can improve the drafting of these gameday contracts to limit potential liability and risk of incurring contract damages.

Locating the Applicable Law

To identify the legal issues, sport management researchers review secondary source materials. Legal encyclopedias, treatises, digests, law review articles, and textbooks can all help the researcher gain a preliminary understanding of the legal issues and principles associated with the research question. For example, imagine that you want to research whether coaches can be fired for violent behavior. Determine what areas of law are implicated: labor relations, assault and battery, teacher rights, employment law, and contract law. You could use encyclopedias and treatises to help you sift information and narrow your search to what ultimately may be a simple question of either contract law (Does the coach have a contract, and if so, what does it say about termination?) or employer–employee relations (Is the coach an employee at will, or must the school demonstrate just cause to terminate?). Digests will provide references to court decisions related to your issue or subject. If your issue relates to a specific state or federal statute, check the statute for annotations that address related statutes, legislative history, law review articles, and court decisions. You might also consult a textbook chapter on contract law or sport law for an overview of issues related to coaches’ contracts. Finally, law review articles may have already examined a variety of issues regarding termination of coaches’ contracts or wrongful termination of public employees: you must do a thorough search for all relevant secondary sources to avoid duplicating someone else’s research efforts and to purposely select an area of research that is either understudied or subject to confusion regarding the current state of the law due to inconsistent judicial decisions.

For another example, imagine that you are a researcher interested in studying the broad topic of gender equity in athletics. You must narrow your focus to a specific legal issue connected to the broader topic and demonstrate why it is important to examine it in greater detail. If you review a few secondary sources and even some primary sources (e.g., case decisions), you will discover that, to impose liability on an educational institution under Title IX, a plaintiff must prove that the educational institution had notice of discrimination based on sex and acted with “deliberate indifference” in remedying the alleged discrimination. This standard contains at least three elements: first, that the educational institution had notice of an alleged act of sex discrimination; second, that the alleged discriminatory conduct must be based on sex; and third, that the educational institution acted with deliberate indifference toward the discrimination. Any one of these three elements could be a sufficient area for further legal analysis and study; for instance, it would be appropriate to narrow a research question down to defining and understanding the concept of deliberate indifference because that standard is applied in Title IX cases. This step can be the most difficult one because we may want instinctively to address larger, more global issues, but if we narrow our topic and research question at the outset, it is more likely that we will make a meaningful contribution to the body of knowledge in the chosen area of the law.

Writing the Research Question

Your final research question should integrate specific facts and issues associated with the problem. Narrowing the scope of your research question is critically important in your initial efforts to locate a relevant body of case law.

Consider the following example of how to define a research question. In Board of Supervisors of Louisiana State University et al. v. Smack Apparel (2008), the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit held that a university’s school colors can be protected as stand-alone trademarks. The appellate decision represented a major shift in broadening the scope of trademark protection for collegiate institutions and had serious implications for the licensing programs at universities with high-profile athletic programs, where licensing royalties represent a significant source of revenue. By starting the research process with the location and identification of relevant case law, the researcher can narrow their focus on the legal issues being studied, avoiding peripheral issues that are irrelevant to the research question. The danger of getting derailed by unrelated issues is particularly acute for student researchers, who may be performing the legal research process for the first time.

In this example, the initial research question could be stated as follows: What is the scope of protection for college trademarks and logos? By locating case law using a keyword search for “trademark” and “color scheme”, reading the Smack Apparel decision, and reviewing additional secondary sources, the researcher can further refine the research question to something like this: “What are the implications for the collegiate licensing industry resulting from extending federal trademark protection to color schemes used by collegiate athletic programs?” This research question was examined by Grady and McKelvey (2008). Once a research question has been identified, narrowed, and written down, the researcher enters the second phase and begins to organize a research plan.

More Excerpts From Research Methods and Design in Sport Management-3rd Edition

---