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A New Perspective on the NBA Age Rule

By Rick Karcher, Michael McCann, Geoffrey Rapp, Greg Skidmore, and Howard Wasserman

In the course of updating my research file and wrapping up a statistical sequel to my 2008 paper about the NBA age rule, I came across a new law review article in the St. John's Law Review by Susan McAleavey. In the article, McAleavey introduces an "alternative" to the NBA current rule - a spendthrift trust system. It has been over a decade since I took Wills, Trusts, and Estates as a 2L, so I had to dust off my Black's Law Dictionary and refresh my memory about the special characteristics of spendthrift trusts. Such trusts are defined as follows:

A trust that prohibits the beneficiary's interest from being assigned and also prevents a creditor from attaching that interest.

McAleavey has a multi-pronged argument supporting her position. I recommend reading her work, especially Section III of the article, which is novel and clever. I plan on citing her article moving forward.

There is a lot of academic research on the topic of minimum age rules in sports (links to several such articles here). The issue will be one of several hot-button topics negotiated by the NBA and NBPA in their upcoming collective bargaining sessions.

For micro-updates on the legality and efficacy of age eligibility rules in sports over the course of the next few months as I work on several papers in this research line, feel free to follow me on Twitter at (@sportslawprof). I am presenting a quantitative analysis of the WTA age rule at the Southern Economic Association conference this weekend in Atlanta and look forward to feedback and constructive criticism as the paper is vetted.

Full post as published by Sports Law Blog on November 17, 2010 (boomark / email).