SICA Conference

[LarryS]

First off, I am not an attorney.

However, the Supreme Court has repeatedly ruled that people and organizations have a Constitutionally protected right to free association. If you recall, the most recent high profile ruling was related to the Boy Scouts of America when they ruled that the BSA had the right to put into place whatever membership restrictions they desired. Now this would be a little apples and oranges as the districts probably receive some tax dollars. However, if a non-attorney like me can think about saying "We are restricting the number of initial members in this conference to X, and we are already at that number. If, at some future date, the conference decides to expand we would welcome applications from the remaining SICA institutions." I feel sure that they are prepared for the suit. It is probably safe to assume the districts had some bright legal minds helping them organize.

Is it fair...maybe, maybe not. But life's not fair...grow up and get over it. This smells like "WAAA, they wont play with me!"

And, I agree with Texas Aggie...if a federal judge denies these districts their right to free association, he is a bonehead. I will even go as far as to say he would deserve to be impeached.

[Texas Aggie]

Well if you do not work in any Civil Rights law experience, I am sure there are statues that any lawyer would not be familiar with if they are not in that particular field.

What I said was it wasn't my primary area of practice. I'm quite familiar with virtually all civil rights statutes, as they are in a general area of the US Code. I am also making an educated guess at the various causes of action alleged as I haven't seen the complaint and can't find it on the federal database. Either it isn't on the system yet, wasn't filed in Illinois, isn't filed in federal court, was filed prior to 2006, or contains a party name I can't resolve from the article. Its almost certain that at least one of these holds true. Without seeing the actual complaint, I can only go by what I presume the various causes of action are. Perhaps they are alleging something I'm not familiar with but if its legitimate, that's not very likely. I've litigated several cases, including civil rights type cases, in federal court.

I would also bet that there issues at hand that are not quite reported in the media.

I am in 100% agreement with this.

To say that if someone rules in the favor of the plaintiffs in this case or if a federal judge finds some validated in the case and to call them boneheaded is interesting to me.

What I said was that I wouldn't be surprised if a boneheaded federal judge issues an injunction (didn't say anything about the merits of the case), implying he would be doing so without case. As I've explained, I would be very hard pressed to see how the plaintiffs in this matter have a valid complaint, much less any real success of winning, since for them to win, the court would have to violate the guaranteed rights of the school districts that have formed the conference they want to play in. A judge that grants an injunction on this nonsense would be boneheaded as he's only doing it for political, rather than legal, reasons. Unfortunately, there are too many federal judges that have a God-like complex since they are virtually immune from removal.

Now, if there's more information that you or anyone else has on this matter, I would be happy to reconsider. I'm basing my comments on the article, and while I agree that could potentially be short-sighted, its all in discussion here. I presume thats what you had in mind by posting the article in the first place.

And no, I've actually never been to Washington. I've constructed databases with information on colleges for years for sports stats (BCS computer type ratings) so I'm familiar with virtually every reasonably sized college in the US.

[26 Year Gap]

34 schools in one conference? Seems a bit unwieldy to me. Most conferences I have seen, and granted those are only in New England, seem to cap off at 10-12 schools.