August 03, 2005

Michael McCann of Sports Law Blog has a roundup of the nominee's record on legal disputes arising from the playing field. One highlight:

as a litigation partner at Hogan & Hartson, he successfully defended the National Collegiate Athletic Association ("NCAA") against a lawsuit by Renee Smith, a law school student who alleged that the NCAA, when it refused to allow her to participate in postgraduate intercollegiate volleyball, discriminated against her because of her sex.

Critics hoping to assail Roberts as a sexist troglodyte on the basis of this representation may not get very far, however, because the position he argued -- that the NCAA is not subject to Title IX at all, although federally supported colleges and universities happen to pay dues to it -- is so palpably reasonable that it won the votes of all nine Justices in an opinion written by Ruth Bader Ginsburg.