Thursday, September 15, 2022

City of Oakland v. Oakland Raiders (Cal. Ct. App. - Sept. 15, 2022)

NFL creates meaningless, non-binding and open-ended set of "considerations" that team owners might want to think about when deciding whether or not to let teams move cities in order to stop Congress from enacting proposed legislation that might otherwise tie their hands. Oakland Raiders ask to move to Las Vegas and owners vote 31-1 to let them move. City of Oakland sues NFL and everyone who voted to let the team move claiming that it's a third party beneficiary of this (essentially meaningless) contract entered into by the NFL teams.

The Court of Appeal rightly disagrees, and affirms the judgment dismissing the complaint.

This is one of the easier billion-dollar appeals you'll ever see resolved. Not tough, in my view.

(It was much more difficult, by contrast, to figure out which professional football teams were which in the caption. When you look at the list of the represented parties, most of the teams are readily identifiable; e.g., "The Chicago Bears Football Club," "The Rams Football Company, LLC," etc. But you're a true NFL pro, by contrast, if you can tell me without looking it up which team is formally "PDB Sports Ltd" or "Pro-Football, Inc." I was able to figure out pretty much everyone else, but those two you either need to look up or figure out by process of elimination.)