Paul DeCamp, a Member of the Firm in the Employment, Labor & Workforce Management practice, in the firm’s Washington, DC office, was quoted in Bloomberg BNA Daily Labor Report, in “NCAA Players Are Employees per Aid Rules, Footballer Says,” by Jon Steingart. (Read the full version – subscription required.)
Following is an excerpt:
College student-athletes who receive scholarships should be considered school employees who are entitled to pay, according to a lawsuit filed Sept. 26 in a federal court in Pennsylvania (Livers v. Nat’l Collegiate Athletic Ass’n, E.D. Pa., No. 2:17-cv-04271, complaint filed 9/26/17). …
The Seventh Circuit establishes precedent for federal courts in Illinois, Indiana, and Wisconsin, but not Pennsylvania. Berger and Hennig’s lawsuit against a school in Pennsylvania ended in an appeals court in the Midwest because it was filed in Indiana as part of a larger complaint against schools around the country and the NCAA, which is headquartered in Indiana. A district court dismissed all the college defendants except University of Pennsylvania, finding the students couldn’t sue a school they didn’t attend.
“This complaint clearly represents an effort to plead around the defects that caused the courts in Indiana and California to dismiss the other cases alleging that student athletes are employees,” Paul DeCamp, a lawyer now with Epstein Becker & Green P.C. in Washington who represented some of the universities in the Seventh Circuit, told Bloomberg BNA Sept. 26. “Whether the court in Pennsylvania and eventually the Third Circuit will view these changes as sufficient to overcome those challenges remains to be seen.”
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