Asser Sports Law Lunch & Learn "International and Comparative Sports Justice"

International and Comparative Sports Justice
Michele Colucci and Karen L. Jones eds.  

Sports justice is of paramount importance for any club, athlete, and any other person registered with a sports association.  They all have rights and obligations that are peculiar in the sense that they are proper to the context of sport, and therefore are most appropriately granted or supervised by sports justice within an autonomous system. 

In the name of their autonomy and the specificity of sport many associations around the world developed their own justice bodies.  Some of them seem to be more effective than others but all share the same goal: to settle disputes, to mediate and to guarantee the correct interpretation of sporting rules and regulations.

This is not a simple task since the scope of sports justice is not always easy to describe.  In fact ordinary justice maintains its role in granting and supervising certain rights and obligations that are not so different from those protected by sports justice. 

The lines of distinction become even more blurred when issues of individual or fundamental rights come into play.

This has become an interesting paradox, because sports justice and ordinary justice are not always discernable.  One possible explanation may be found in the reality of certain countries where the two systems tend to converge. 

During this Lunch&Learn and book launch, the editors of the book on International and Comparative Sports Justice, and co-authors of the comparative chapter, Michele Colucci and Karen L. Jones, along with some of the book chapter authors (e.g. Takuya Yamazaki - Japan, Marketa Haindlova - Czech Republic), will discuss the topic of the book – ordinary justice versus sports justice.

They will address the importance of this topic, look at some of the differences at the international and national sports organization level, and highlight some of the interesting findings including some of the conclusions and best practices that are detailed in the final comparative chapter.