Not the end of football

Back in February, I wrote about an essay on Grantland by Tyler Cowen and Kevin Grier describing how footbal could end as a major sport as a result of head-injury lawsuits. Today in Slate, Will Oremus challenges that conclusion, arguing that the difficulty of proving liability in these cases given an assumption-of-risk defense and state-law sovereign immunity, makes it unlikely that we will see the numbers of big-money judgments that would cause high schools and colleges to want to get out of the football business.

Interestingly, Oremus rejects the idea that change can happen through lawsuits against individuals or even educational institutions. In his view, any change should

come not from the courts but from high-school athletic conferences, scholastic sports associations, and the NCAA. As the research rolls in, they need to take a hard look at the aspects of the game that inflict the most damage and implement rule changes accordingly. If football ends someday, it should only be because the powers that oversee the sport have tried everything to make it safe and determined that it can’t be done—not because lawsuits have spooked schools into giving up.

This is a sharp reflection of the modern understanding of tort law, the courts, and the administrative state. The regulating institutions should take care of the problems--even if those institutions have vested interests in protecting what they are supposed to be regulating. And courts do not achieve justice or truth at the systemic level--they only play on people's fear to surrender and pay out windfalls to a few individuals.