The 8th U.S. Circuit 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. Along with the hearing date, the court set an aggressive briefing schedule and limited each parties oral arguments at the hearing to 30 minutes before Judges Duane Benton, Kermit Bye and Steven Colloton.
“The players are going to continue to work tirelessly to beat this lockout,” said NFLPA spokesman George Atallah. He added, “An expedited hearing means players can make an expedited case for getting football back on the field.”
Here’s the schedule of key dates on the lockout legal calendar:
May 9th – NFL’s opening brief due
May 12 – Hearing in the TV damages case
May 16 – Mediation scheduled to resume
May 20 -Players response brief due
May 26 - NFL’s reply brief due
June 3 – Appeal hearing on the stay
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.
On April 25, the district court issued an injunction which briefly ended the lockout and two days later also denied the NFL’s request to stay the injunction. U.S.District Judge Susan Richard Nelson in rejecting the NFL’s request stated, “the Brady Plaintiffs have shown not only that they likely would suffer irreparable harm absent the preliminary injunction, but that they are in fact suffering such harm now.” In reaching this conclusion, Judge Nelson noted that there was “extensive affidavit evidence submitted by the Brady Plaintiffs” and that the NFL “offered little, if any evidence to directly rebut the players’ evidence or support its motion for a stay pending appeal .”
In its submissions to the circuit court, 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.”
The lack of factual evidence submitted by the NFL was something that Circuit Judge Bye highlighted in his dissenting opinion to the order granting the temporary stay on April 29. In his opinion, he 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.”
Judge Nelson in her decision denying the NFL’s request for a stay, wrote that without an expedited appeal a decision by the circuit court on the injunction would “seem unlikely” before the scheduled start of the 2011 season. Now that the circuit court has granted an expedited appeal a decision is theoretically possible before then. The circuit court does not have any guidelines on when it will issue its decision after the June 3 hearing although Michael Gans, the clerk for the Court of Appeals has said that it would be logical to assume that the decision will be on an expedited basis.
Following the decertification of the players union and the expiration of the CBA, the players filed an antitrust lawsuit against the league. That lawsuit is still pending before Judge Nelson but the current focus has been on the status of the lockout.
Yesterday’s decision does not change the status of the lockout although a decision by the three-panel of judges is expected this week on whether to stay the injunction pending the appeal. Bottom line still no football.
