Everyone knows that, long before he was a Republican Party candidate for the United States Senate in California, Steve Garvey was a Major League Baseball star. What is less well known is that Garvey was not popular with the other players. Also, he was an implacable foe of the players' union, the Major League Players Association.
This led to an interesting situation when the MLPA won a major case against the baseball team owners. In that case, it was held that the owners had illegally colluded to limit the salaries of players who were free agents in the late 1980s. One result of that decision was that the MLPA received $280 million to divide fairly among players who claimed that the collusion had caused them to receive salaries less than they would have received had there been no collusion.
Garvey made a claim to the union. The union ruled that Garvey was entitled to nothing, because the compensation he received was the same as he would have received absent the collusion. This finding may have been unique to Garvey.
Garvey took his claim to binding arbitration against the union. The arbitrator ruled against Garvey in a decision based on questionable logic and what appeared to be a skewed interpretation of the factual record. Garvey challenged the decision in the Federal District Court, which ruled that flaws in the arbitrator's reasoning were irrelevant under settled law establishing the primacy of binding arbitration in resolution of labor disputes covered by collective bargaining agreements.
The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals reversed, holding that the arbitrator's decision was so out of line that it could not be respected in a court of law. The union petitioned the United States Supreme Court for cert.
This is where my father, David Feller, came in. He had been a union lawyer in Washington D.C. in the firm of Arthur Goldberg, served as General Counsel to the United Steelworkers and argued a number of landmark labor law cases in the Supreme Court. Since 1967 he had been a professor at Berkeley Law and had authored A General Theory of the Collective Bargaining Agreement, a seminal work on union contracts. He had also become an arbitrator of labor law cases and served as President of the National Academy of Arbitrators.
David Feller had a history with the players' union. He was a close friend of the union's first executive director, Marvin Miller, who had been a negotiator for the Steelworkers when David was the Steelworkers' lawyer. David had served as an informal consultant to the players' union over the years.
David felt that the arbitrator's decision against Garvey was not legally justifiable and that objectively, the case was not worthy of Supreme Court consideration. However, he persuaded the National Academy of Arbitrators to file an amicus brief in the Supreme Court, arguing that the Court should simply reverse the Ninth Circuit ruling, without argument, in a per curiam opinion reasserting the sanctity of arbitrators' decisions in the context of labor law.
My dad wrote the brief and the Supreme Court did exactly what he recommended. Garvey got nothing from the collusion settlement fund.
The case is Major League Players Association v. Garvey, 532 US 504 (2001). Given the history of the case, the dissent by Justice Stevens is amusing. Stevens says that he does not necessarily disagree with the decision, but states that he cannot "conclude that the [Ninth Circuit] decision was so wrong as to require the extraordinary remedy of a summary reversal . . . without the benefit of briefing or argument."
So that is how my dad, who was a great baseball fan but no athlete himself, struck out Steve Garvey at the United States Supreme Court.
