Twenty-five not out

Hayden Opie has a small chuckle when asked to reflect on 25 years of teaching the Sports Law Program at Melbourne Law School. “When I started showing an interest in sports law in the early 1980s, a friend of mine – a school PE teacher – asked me, ‘Do we really want to do that? We don’t want the lawyers mucking up sport!’

“I thought at the time legal issues in sport were going to come up, and that it would be better if people in sport were prepared for that and not have it imposed on them in terms that were unsatisfactory,” he says.

Fast-forward to today and it’s hard to imagine a world where the law is separated from sport. Cases of the past 12 months that have involved Lance Armstrong, the Essendon Football Club in the AFL and the Cronulla Sharks in the NRL are some evidence of this, not to mention match-fixing scandals in some of Europe’s biggest football leagues. 

The Program had auspicious beginnings as well, commencing just before the Seoul Olympic Games, which in turn is well remembered as the occasion sprinter Ben Johnson was caught taking anabolic steroids. 

For a former commercial lawyer whose main exposure to sport at the time was in grassroots administration – as a referee and under-12s coach for Melbourne University’s junior hockey club – Opie says that far from mucking things up, the law has evolved as sport has, often leading the way across disciplines. 

“I say this to new lawyers: You are going to be doing stuff that no one else has done before that’s going to be interesting, challenging and exciting. It may sometimes be routine legal work in a new context, but some of it will be brand new, like doping, intellectual property, integrity and match fixing, marketing and so on.

“If you speak to lawyers in competition law, many of the significant cases and developments in that area have been about sport. It’s clear – sport is the driver of change and development, and we’re seeing it again in media law with things like anti-siphoning and copyright.” 

But if the cultural mystique surrounding sport has taught us anything, it’s that people are fascinated and entranced by it, and Opie agrees.

“People get turned on by sport, it’s a universal language and I think it’s really interesting to be at the cutting-edge of things that have a great public interest.“

Plenty of big names have studied the program. Malcolm Speed, who at the time was a Melbourne barrister and executive chairman of the National Basketball League, studied at the Law School on his way to becoming Chief Executive of the International Cricket Council, and so too did the current Director-General of the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA), New Zealander David Howman.  Ditto Eugenie Buckley (former CEO, ICC Women’s World Cup 2009), Steven Wright (former CEO of Richmond Tigers and the Australian Grand Prix Corporation) and Andrew Twaits (former CEO of Betfair).

“It is almost a rite of passage now,” says Opie, who is still Director of Studies of the program he founded all those years ago. “Sports law professionals either get a job and get sent here to complete further study or they do it in reverse and use their study as leverage to get the job they want.

“We’re certainly the first and most comprehensive sports law program in the country, and we’re innovative and interesting enough to be considered one of the world leaders.”

Little wonder then that a contingent of former graduates and current professionals will be making the trip to the Law School on 11 and 12 July to take part in a series of events celebrating the 25-year milestone.

The Program will grow again in 2014 with the introduction of a new sports law subject (bringing the total to 13), namely, Sports Integrity and Investigations, a subject that will tackle everything from the rise in match-fixing in the Indian Premier League to the allegations of corruption in sports voting such as those levelled at FIFA.  Doping too, as the law struggles to keep up with the rise in non-analytical cases; that is, cases where evidence of doping exists but no positive drug test has been returned.

As for the future of sports law, Hayden Opie is bullish, with even more growth on the horizon as sporting codes evolve and the cases become more complex. “I think we’ll see increased specialisation in sports law to match this increased complexity. The challenge is going to be how good the is law in terms of serving the needs of both sport and the wider community. We do need to create an environment where everyone is catered for.

“The needs of school sport, or even the under-12s on a Saturday morning are going to be quite different from say the World Cup. They will be kind of connected, say in how we look at injury and insurance compliance. But fundamentally we want a legal environment that encourages a great experience in participation of sport that balances out the needs and requirements of elite and commercial sport. And this will be the greatest challenge.”

www.law.unimelb.edu.au/masters/specialist-legal-areas/sports-law