Sports Law Clinic

The Harvard Journal of Sports and Entertainment Law publishes special edition focused on the NCAA and the rights of student-athletes to profit from their own name, likeness or image.

HLS Lecturer Peter Carfagna ’79 discusses Major League Baseball’s return to play during the COVID-19 pandemic.

More than 100 years after students started the Harvard Legal Aid Bureau, there are now 40 clinics and Student Practice Organizations at HLS, focused on everything from cyberlaw to veterans’ rights.

Executives representing the three most popular major sports leagues in the U.S. offered insights into the business and legal maneuvering behind the games, during the HLS 200 panel “A View from the Top.”

Major League Baseball Commissioner Rob Manfred '83 recently spoke with Harvard Law Today reporter Jonathan Topaz ’18 about his time at HLS and some pressing issues facing the MLB.

Peter Carfagna, lecturer on law and director of the Sports Law Clinic at Harvard Law School, recently spoke with the Harvard Gazette about the 'Deflategate' dispute and what impact the case may have on NFL players, and on the league.

Suddenly, the N.C.A.A. is forced to play defense in more than one court.

The following post originally appeared in the Harvard Gazette on March 27, 2014. As the men’s basketball tournament known as March Madness edges closer to crowning…

On February 21st, four Harvard Law School students – Michael McGregor '15, Daniel McMann '14, Daniel Loveland '14, and Russell Yavner '14 – were honored with the Weiler Awards presented at the Committee on Sports and Entertainment Law’s 2014 Symposium.

Exactly how far does an agent need to go to keep a professional athlete happy? Just ask Jeff Schwartz, who represents Boston Celtics all-star player Paul Pierce. “[Paul] sometimes calls me at 4 in the morning, just to see if I’ll answer my phone, which I don’t do anymore,” Schwartz recently told Harvard Law School students. “First thing in the morning, I call him back and he says, ‘too late, I’m dead.’ ” Harvard Law School students enjoyed this and other behind-the-scenes tidbits from the world of professional athlete representation in a recent two-hour Q&A hosted by HLS Lecturer Peter Carfagna ’79 for his class, “Sports and the Law: Representing the Professional Athlete.”

Two years after considering the possibility of work stoppages in major league sports, the annual Harvard Law School Sports Law Symposium this year examined unresolved issues in the aftermath of collective bargaining agreements, as well as the ongoing problems of concussions and performance-enhancing drugs.

In a panel discussion sponsored by HLS Lecturer on Law Peter Carfagna ’79 and Harvard Law School's Committee on Sports and Entertainment Law, “Negotiating with The League: Representing the NFLPA,” Peter Kendall, a retired NFL player who was involved in the league’s summer contract renegotiations offered an insider’s account of the collective bargaining victory that preserved this fall's season.

With a mixture of storytelling about his groundbreaking role in amateur basketball and critiques of the NCAA and NBA, former sports marketing executive Sonny Vaccaro gave the keynote address at the third annual HLS Sports Law Symposium on March 25.

Since signing with the Boston Celtics in August 2010, Shaquille O’Neal has posed as a statue in Harvard Square, sang the “Cheers” theme song at the Cheers bar in Boston, and conducted the Boston Pops at Symphony Hall. He can now add “helped teach a class at Harvard Law School” to that list.

HLS Professor Alan Dershowitz wrote “Baseball errs with lax penalty on pitchers who take aim at hitters,” an op-ed that appeared in the Aug. 19, 2009, edition of The Boston Globe.