Hackney Publications, the nation’s leading publisher of sports law periodicals, has announced that new tools are being added to Sports Litigation Alert (Alert), a periodical that has been used in sports law classrooms for more than 15 years, which will make it even more useful for professors and their college students. “There’s a challenge in sports law classes in that the legal developments highlighted in textbooks become old news by the first day of class,” said Editor Holt Hackney, a life-long journalist who has been covering sports business and sports law for more than three decades.
“Sports Litigation Alert solves that problem, since it publishes every two weeks, featuring five case summaries and eight to 12 articles. This is the main reason the Alert is used in about 75 classrooms any given semester.
“Use of the Alert would be even broader, except for the fact that the content in each issue does not track the syllabus or text. Sports Litigation Alert reports on news as it happens in the industry.”
To remedy this, Hackney Publications has piloted a program for professors over the last two years where it provides participating professors with 12 subject-matter compendiums at the beginning of the semester. These are created by pulling material from the last six months of Alerts. Among the dozen topics are Title IX/gender equity, negligence/assumption of risk, antitrust, and contracts.
“These compendiums, which professors share with students, more closely mirror the syllabus or textbook,” said Hackney. “This was really the missing piece.”
This is not the only tool provided by Hackney Publications to professors.
“We also provide a set of questions and answers for each of the five case summaries that professors can use to ensure that students are absorbing the material,” said Hackney. “These are just two of the ways professors are using the Alert.
“There are many others, which were highlighted, in part, by former sports law professor Linda Sharp in a recent article here.”
Hackney Publications has also gone to great lengths to introduce flexible subscription models.
First, libraries can subscribe, either directly through Hackney Publications or subscriptions services like EBSCO and W.S. Hein. The company makes the issues as well as the searchable archive of more than 3,000 case summaries and articles available to the library’s network.
Second, Hackney Publications offers academic subscriptions to professors for personal use. With such subscriptions, professors receive the issues every two weeks and have access to the searchable archive. Subscriptions to the Alert offer a great way for professors to track what is going on in the industry and being to access a robust archive or original case summaries and articles.
Third, Hackney Publications provides a complimentary subscription program when professors fully embrace the Alert and ask their students to subscribe at a student rate of $15 a semester. Professors implement the program by either passing out a URL at the beginning of the semester, or by making the subscription a class fee, where the college and university collects the fee and remits payment to Hackney Publications.
All subscriptions can be started here: https://sportslitigationalert.com/subscriptions/
“The class fee concept has become extremely popular over the last couple years,” said Hackney. “This has happened in parallel with the fact that the Alert has become more intertwined with the syllabus and/or textbook.”
