NBA Rules and Legal Formalism

A couple of interesting posts and comments from Michael Dorf at DorfOnLaw about the suspensions of the Spurs' Robert Horry and the Suns' Amare Stoudemire and Boris Diaw over the "altercation" in Game 4 of the Phoenix-San Antonio series.

The issue is how the NBA's rules against leaving the bench, and Stu Jackson's decision to suspend Stoudemire and Diaw for doing so (or almost doing so, since neither actually made it to the fray but quickly jumped back off the court), reflects ancient debates about legal formalism; the advantages and disadvantages of relying on hard legal rules as opposed to more flexible legal standards; and the idea of law v. morality (or justness, if you will). There also is some interesting lawyering going on among Suns backers: The argument has been made that the rule against leaving the bench to join an altercation was not triggered in this situation, because what happened on the court (Horry's hip-check of Nash) was not an altercation. It did not carry the day, obviously, but a cute argument.

Worth a read.

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