Matt Mitten, one of the sports law industry’s most respected leaders, has received the Association of American Law Schools’ Section on Law and Sports Award for excellence in legal education.
Mitten is a professor of law and the Executive Director of the National Sports Law Institute at Marquette University Law School in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. He currently teaches Amateur Sports Law, Professional Sports Law, Sports Sponsorship Legal and Business Issues Workshop, Antitrust Law, and Torts, and has also taught Comparative Sports Law, International Sports Law, Legal Ethics and Professional Responsibility, and a Sports Law seminar during his 28-year teaching career.
In recognizing Mitten at the convention, Jodi S. Balsam, the section chair and Associate Professor of Clinical Law and Director, Externship Programs, Brooklyn Law School, “focused on the three areas the award recognizes:
“Teaching: During his 29-year teaching career he has taught courses in Amateur Sports Law, Professional Sports Law, Sports Sponsorship Legal and Business Issues, Antitrust, Torts, Comparative Sports Law, International Sports Law, Legal Ethics, and Professional Responsibility.
“Scholarship: Matt has authored Sports Law in the United States (currently in 3d ed.), as well as co-authored two leading textbooks used in sports law courses—Sports Law and Regulation: Cases, Materials, and Problems (currently in 4th ed.), and Sports Law: Governance and Regulation (currently in 2d ed.). He has also published numerous important articles in leading law reviews that helped define the field along with articles in medical journals such as The New England Journal of Medicine. He is a member of the advisory board for The International Sports Law Journal.
“Practice/Service: Matt is an arbitrator for the Court of Arbitration for Sport (Lausanne, Switzerland) (serving on the ad hoc division for the XXI Winter Olympic Games in Sochi, Russia) and the American Arbitration Association’s commercial, consumer, and sports arbitration panels as well as the UFC and the Ladies Professional Golfers Association anti-doping panels. He has been appointed/served as the sole arbitrator, chair, or panel member in numerous sports, commercial, and consumer arbitrations. He is a member of the Sports Lawyers Association (SLA) Board of Directors (serving as SLA president from May 2015-May 2017) and the advisory board for the Sports & Society Initiative of The Ohio State University College of Arts and Sciences. He formerly chaired the American Association of Law Schools’ Section on Law and Sports and the National Collegiate Athletic Association’s Committee on Competitive Safeguards and Medical Aspects of Sports, and served on the inaugural Board of Directors of the Forum for the Scholarly Study of Intercollegiate Athletics at the invitation of former NCAA president Myles Brand. When does he sleep?”
Balsam summed up Mitten’s contributions by noting that his “contributions to our section, to the development of sports law as an academic discipline, and to the field generally certainly put him among the elite group of those for whom this award was intended.”
