Review: Why The NFL Should Not Compel Its Players To Speak To The Media

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“Free Speech, Football, and Freedom: Why the NFL Should Not Compel Its Players to Speak to the Media”, by Sohil Shah, with his J.D for Emory University of Law and his B.A, from Northwestern University. This article was written and published in the fall of 2014, in the Texas Review of Entertainment & Sports Laws. In Shah’s article he argues how the NFL forces players to talk to the media are a due-process violations of the First Amendment right of freedom of speech and how he does not believe that the NFL should make players talk to the media if they do not want to. Therefore, with his article being an argumentative essay, Shah also provides actual court cases to support his. One case which involved Seattle Seahawk’s running back, Marshawn Lynch, …show more content…

One of the main ones was with Marshawn Lynch, when the NFL forced him to speak with the media after refusing to talk to the media the entire previous year, which he was actually fined $50,000 for not talking. After that Lynch had two options, which were, talk with the media or be fined another $50,000. Shah used the NFL policy, which stated that players must speak with the media after games, but to support his argument he included the First Amendment right to freedom of speech. Statistics were brought into play when Shah stated, “The NFL can be considered a state actor under the entanglement-entwinement exception to the state-action doctrine for a variety of reasons.” (46) Therefore, by being funded by the government the NFL should abide by the rules of the government, and which they are not because the First Amendment states that everyone has a right to freedom of speech. And it is necessary because the government is a state actor. So, with statistics about Lynch and different cases it helps lawyers support their beliefs on the NFL policies, whether or not if they were to have court cases themselves on topics related to

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