INTERNATIONAL SPORTS LAW: A REPLAY OF CHARACTERISTICS AND TRENDS By James A. R.

Nafziger * The much-neglected field of international sports law 1 is changing significantly. From a patchwork of hard and soft law cultivated by the Olympic Movement, a more structured pattern of international administration and dispute resolution is emerging. Trends include the exercise by transnational sports organizations of greater and more uniform authority over athletes and athletic activity; improved mechanisms for resolving disputes and appealing decisions within those organizations; and a modest inclination toward arbitration and adjudication of disputes. Also, attention has shifted within the arena of international sports from political issues to social, economic and organizational issues and toward applying principles of procedural and substantive fairness to resolving disputes. These trends in administration and dispute resolution are interrelated. As the organizations that directly regulate sports activity become more intrusive, they generate expectations and entitlements that require more stable and equitable rules and procedures of enforcement. The evolving legal framework has important implications for participants and spectators in both sports and the international legal process. Among students and practitioners of international law, the role of nongovernmental sports organizations in gaining governmental and intergovernmental support, in shaping a still immature body of law, in acquiring a measure of legal personality, and in responding to new issues is of general professional interest. Athletic competition is a fundamental human activity whose history has been replete with international problems. Understanding the peculiar blending of governmental, intergovernmental and nongovernmental authority over political and other consequences of sports activity is therefore significant. As a mechanism of social control, the emerging process of international sports law provides insights into opportunities for, as well as limitations of, international cooperation and collective action. It is instructive, for example, to observe a modest transformation in the preferred method for resolving disputes from administrative fiat to more participatory processes within and outside NGOs, including arbitration. Gradually, adjudication of disputes is becoming more congenial to the interests of athletes, but it remains a somewhat unreliable technique for administering justice in individual cases. Recent litigation concerning the America's Cup sailing competition, discussed in the concluding substantive section of this article, underscores by negative implication the merits of evolving processes for dispute avoidance and resolution. ____________________ * Professor of Law, Willamette University. 1 International sports law may be broadly defined as "a more or less distinctive body of' rules, principles and procedures that govern the political and social consequences of' transnational sports

activity." J. NAFZIGER, INTERNATIONAL SPORTS LAW1. ( 1988 ). -489I. THE LEGAL FRAMEWORK The public worships sports.2 Television has transformed the stadium into a commons for expressing both international understanding and conflict. It is a global commons with political dimensions. In 1991, for example, the spotlight was on the Pan-American Games in Havana, the world track-and-field championships in Tokyo, the Asian Games in Beijing and, also in China, the first World Cup for women's football (soccer). In 1992 the spotlight turned to the Olympic venues of Albertville and Barcelona in a unifying Europe. The presentation of such well known spectacles at politically significant sites underlines the prominence and dispersion of major competitions, their reflection of geopolitics, their importance to states and their foreign-policy implications. Virtually all major sports events have been dogged, however, by such issues as political boycotts, nonrecognition of national teams and individuals by host governments, eligibility of athletes, sub stance abuse, commercialization and jurisdictional squabbles between competing sports organizations. Although the contours of legal responses to these problems are imprecise, one can identify a distinct, though limited, network of national and transnational law that influences and imposes sanctions on governmental and nongovernmental activity in the sports arena. This network encompasses a broad range of subject matter. On the political level, the law includes, for example, constraints on gov ernmental disruption of competition, extradition and other procedures to deter and respond to violence by spectators and terrorism, sanctions against apartheid and other discriminatory practices by states, and rules of recognition and nonrec ognition that ensure access of athletes to competition despite entry restrictions by states. On the socioeconomic level, the emerging regime addresses such problems as substance use and abuse, commercialization, intellectual property rights, taxa tion and double taxation of income, eligibility of athletes, and contracting of players. Since 1985, several pertinent agreements have come into force. These include the International Convention against Apartheid in Sports, the European Conventions on Spectator Violence and Anti-Doping, the European ...
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