Harvard Journal of Sports and Entertainment Law

Each year, students join Harvards only student organization dedicated to sports and entertainment law: the Committee on Sports and Entertainment Law (CSEL). Currently, CSEL consists of over 150 members, many of whom aspire to practice sports or entertainment law after graduation. Though most will enroll in the handful of courses available at Harvard Law School that explore these fields, they lack other intellectual and academic opportunities related to sports and entertainment law at Harvard.

The Harvard Journal of Sports and Entertainment Law (JSEL) will provide the Harvard community, the relevant industries, and the legal world with scholarly analysis and research related to the legal aspects of sports and entertainment. These fields lack significant scholarly analysis, although they present issues of interest in several prominent areas of the law, including antitrust law, copyright law, labor law, civil procedure, corporate law, contract law, and real estate law. The journal will provide a forum in which scholars from these and other disciplines can discuss the law as it relates specifically to the sports and entertainment industries and the unique issues raised therein.

The few existing publications in these fields do not provide a sufficient outlet for the numerous scholarly works written in this field, both by practitioners and students. The creation of JSEL will allow the growing number of interested students and practitioners an opportunity to participate in a journal dedicated to their interests. We believe that Harvard should be at the forefront of the high-visibility issues related to sports and entertainment law, and we expect that JSEL will be the premier source for the scholarly analysis of these issues. We want academic scholars, industry professionals, news media, and others to turn to Harvard when complicated legal issues arise in the sports and entertainment industries.

Because of the significant interest within the student body, the lack of intellectual opportunities in the field at HLS, the relevance of sports and entertainment law to the law in general, and the relative paucity of existing journals in the field, we ask that Harvard Law School approve the creation of the Journal of Sports and Entertainment Law.