The 8th U.S. District Court of Appeals in St. Louis granted the NFL’s request for an expedited appeal on the lockout stay. The hearing is scheduled for June 3 in St. Louis. One of the central issues in the appeal will be the claim by the NFL that it will suffer irreparable harm if the stay is not granted.
A stay pending appeal would only be granted if the NFL can demonstrate that it will suffer irreparable harm if the district court’s decision is not stayed. In its brief, the NFL argued that it would be irreparably harmed if the stay were not granted because the failure to do so would result in “undercutting its labor law rights and irreversibly scrambling the eggs of player-club transactions. Absent a stay there will be a host of changes in the employment relationships between hundreds of players and the 32 NFL teams.”
In addition to claiming the it will be irreparably harmed if a stay is not granted, the NFL argued that the district court did not have jurisdiction over the case in the first place because the Norris-LaGuardia Act of 1932 prohibits federal judges from intervening in labor disputes. While the Norris-LaGuardia Act does limit federal judges ability to intervene in certain peaceful labor disputes, it was enacted with the primary purpose to protect and allow employees to form unions without employer interference.
The players, had submitted declarations from attorney Richard A. Bethelsen who has worked with the NFLPA for almost 40 years and who witnessed previous occasions when the NFL operated without a collective bargaining agreement and suffered no harm. In a letter to the appeals court, the players stated that the district court had concluded that the league submitted little if any evidence to support its request for a stay.
The lack of factual evidence submitted by the NFL was something that Circuit Judge Kermit Edward Bye highlighted in his dissenting opinion to the order granting the temporary stay on April 29. In his opinion, Circuit Judge Bye said that “based on the materials which have been filed in the case up to this point, the NFL has failed to satisfy me it will suffer any irreparable harm from allowing the district court’s order to take effect.”
Today’s decision does not change the status of the lockout. However a ruling on the stay is expected later this week so stay tuned.
