Georgia baseball player Dylan Goldstein’s current eligibility lawsuit against the NCAA has brought allegations of judicial bias to the forefront, after it was revealed that the judge who denied his request for a preliminary injunction, Tilman “Tripp” E. Self III, serves as an active college football referee.
As reported by Sportico, Goldstein’s legal team is now pushing to have Self’s latest ruling vacated and for the judge to be dropped from the case. They argue that Self’s involvement in college sports creates a conflict of interest, making it “impossible to determine where the court’s bias may begin and end on issues directly impacting the NCAA.”
This situation is unusual, though not unprecedented. While the federal bench is typically disconnected from intercollegiate athletics—and while Self is the only known jurist to double as an “NCAA official”—he is not the first to have personal ties.
Several current U.S. District Court judges are former college athletes, and at least three have ruled in cases involving college athletes, programs or the NCAA. Moreover, research has suggested judges don’t necessarily need to have participated in college sports to be influenced it.
A 2018 study, published in American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, analyzed Louisiana’s juvenile court decisions between 1996 and 2012 and determined that judges tended toward issuing harsher sentences when ruling in the immediate aftermath of their home state’s college football team losing.
In 2022, researchers from Troy University and South Carolina’s College Sports Research Institute analyzed 174 judges who ruled in cases involving the NCAA between 1973 and 2020. The NCAA prevailed in 63% of these rulings. Furthermore, CSRI determined, judges that were born in Southeastern Conference states were 43% more likely to rule in favor of the NCAA than those born outside the SEC’s footprint.
Then again, sometimes the latter are the most willing to accede to the association’s wishes.
Forty-one years ago, former Supreme Court Justice Byron “Whizzer” White, an All-American football player at the University of Colorado, served on the nation’s highest court as it issued its landmark 1984 decision in NCAA v. Oklahoma. (Both CU and Oklahoma were in the Big Eight Conference at the time.) While a 7-2 majority upheld a lower court’s ruling that the NCAA had violated antitrust laws through its control and regulation of its members’ college football TV rights, White authored the minority’s dissent. In it, he argued that the NCAA’s control was “eminently reasonable,” because it reduced “the financial incentives toward professionalism.”
When Oklahoma’s Board of Regents originally sued the NCAA in 1981, the case was first assigned to Judge Lee Roy West, an OU alumnus and close friend of Sooners football coach Barry Switzer. To avoid his stated bias for his alma mater, West immediately recused himself from the case, which was reassigned to a district judge in New Mexico, who ruled in favor of the school.
Between 2019 and 2020, two federal judges who played college sports simultaneously presided over separate college sports-related cases.
One of the matters was before senior U.S. District Judge Reggie B. Walton, of the District of Columbia, who played college football at West Virginia State. A George W. Bush appointee, Walton’s notable career as a jurist has included overseeing the trials of Scooter Libby, the former chief of staff to Vice President Dick Cheney; biological weapons expert Steven Hatfill’s civil suit against U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft; and the prosecution of Hall of Fame pitcher Roger Clemens.
In 2010, Judge Walton oversaw Clemens’ arraignment on charges of lying to Congress about his use of performance-enhancing drugs. After Clemens testified, Walton declared a mistrial, ruling that federal prosecutors had presented inadmissible evidence to the jury. Walton then presided over the retrial in 2012, where the jury unanimously acquitted Clemens.
Seven years later, Walton handled a case involving the NCAA, which had been named as a defendant in a medical malpractice litigation filed by former American University field hockey player Jennifer Bradley. According to her complaint—which was originally filed in D.C. Superior Court, then removed to federal court—Bradley alleged that her college coaches and training staff had improperly cleared her in games after she suffered a head injury and showed concussion symptoms.
Bradley was eventually diagnosed with post-concussive syndrome and was unable to complete her degree. The defendants in the case included American University, the Patriot League, sports medicine doctor Dr. Anthony Williams and the United States, which employed Williams as a military physician at the time. For various reasons, Judge Walton dismissed all of the defendants except the United States, which was found liable in a bench trial and ordered to pay $1.75 million in damages. Bradley later appealed Walton’s decisions to dismiss the other defendants but ultimately agreed to drop the appeal after reaching an undisclosed settlement in 2023.
At the same time Walton was hearing Bradley’s suit, Judge Robert J. Conrad, of the Western District of North Carolina, was presiding over the criminal prosecution of Eric Leak, a North Carolina State booster who owned a financial advisory firm for pro athletes called Hot Shots Sports Management.
Prior to becoming a judge, Conrad was a star point guard for Clemson from 1976 to 1980, leading the men’s basketball program to its first of two Elite Eight berths ever. During his playing career, Conrad received Academic All-American honors and the James Weaver Award for the nation’s top academic athlete. After law school, he served as a federal prosecutor before being appointed to his federal judgeship in 2005, assuming senior status in 2023.
Leak, a former NC State football player who had previously been sentenced as part of a separate Medicaid fraud case, appeared before Walton in September 2019 for sentencing after pleading guilty to paying bribes to a number of college athletes so they would sign with Hot Shots. This form of quid pro quo was at the heart of the federal government’s college basketball corruption probe in 2017, which resulted in 10 individuals being arrested. Invoking the perceived failures of that effort, Conrad delayed his sentencing of Leak by a month and challenged the prosecutors charging him to prove how bribing a college athlete alone constituted a federal crime, if it was not done in furtherance of an unlawful activity. Unsatisfied with the government’s response, Leak rejected the plea deal and dismissed the case a few months later.
In neither Bradley’s lawsuit nor Leak’s case does it appear that any party raised concerns about the court’s impartiality, based on their college sports backgrounds.
Ditto for Judge David Orson Carter, of the Central District of California, who lettered in track and field at UCLA. Last year, Carter ruled over a long-running dispute involving his alma mater’s home baseball field, Jackie Robinson Stadium, which leases a piece of land owned by the U.S Department of Veterans Affairs. According to original terms in which the land was deeded to the VA in 1888, it was supposed to be used for purposes that benefited veterans.
In 2013, a different federal judge ruled that the VA had abused these terms in leasing the land to UCLA’s baseball stadium and for other outside purposes but stopped short of ending the lease. However, following a class-action suit filed by disabled homeless veterans, Carter ruled in September to enjoin UCLA from accessing the baseball facilities until the VA could come up with a plan for the 10-acre tract “such that the provisions of services to veterans is the predominant focus of the activities.”
A month later, Carter agreed to allow UCLA temporary access to the stadium through the 2025 college baseball season after it agreed to pay the VA $600,000 for a temporary lease. Carter gave UCLA until July to work out a solution that honored the original deed of the land or else be vanquished from the premises. In November, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals issued a temporary stay of Carter’s order.
Although Brian Matthew Morris, the current chief district judge in Montana, has yet to rule on a college sports case, he brings a unique perspective to the bench as a former starting fullback for Stanford in the 1980s, where he earned academic all-conference honors. Recently, Montana’s governor and attorney general have expressed concerns about the legitimacy of the House v. NCAA settlement, suggesting they may pursue legal action to challenge it. However, with that case currently before U.S. District Judge Claudia Wilken of the Central District of California, it seems unlikely that any action related to the case will end up in Morris’ courtroom. That said, at 61, Morris is still relatively young by federal judge standards, and college sports seems destined produce no shortage of litigation in the future.
Whatever potential or perceived conflicts of interest may arise in college sports, few can compare to the controversy of over a century ago, when Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis, a federal judge in Chicago, was appointed as the first commissioner of baseball while still serving on the bench. This dual role led to a Congressional investigation and an impeachment trial.
Though Landis survived impeachment, the American Bar Association didn’t let him off so easily, censuring him for his questionable career juggling. By 1922, he resigned from his judgeship, telling reporters that there simply wasn’t enough time for him to serve both the field of law and the field of play. He chose the latter.
(This story has been updated in the sixth-to-last paragraph to correct the year when the land leased by UCLA was deeded to the U.S. Department of Veterans affairs.)
