Mitch Nathanson
Professor of Legal Writing
Biography
Professor Nathanson received his JD from the Georgetown University Law Center and his BA from Tulane University. His scholarship focuses primarily on the intersection of sports, law and society. He has written numerous articles examining the interplay between, most notably, baseball and American culture. His article, "The Irrelevance of Baseball's Antitrust Exemption: A Historical Review," won the 2006 McFarland-SABR Award which is presented in recognition of the best historical or biographical baseball articles of the year. His 2008 book, The Fall of the 1977 Phillies: How a Baseball Team’s Collapse Sank a City’s Spirit, is a social history of 20th century Philadelphia as told through the relationship between the city and its baseball teams – the Athletics and the Phillies. In 2009 he was the co-producer and writer of "Base Ball: The Philadelphia Game," a documentary "webisode" on the 19th century development of the game within the city that is part of a larger documentary project, "Philadelphia: The Great Experiment," currently in production and to which he is a contributing scholar. In addition, he was a scholarly advisor to the 2011 HBO production, "The Curious Case of Curt Flood." In the United States, he has lectured at, among other venues, the National Baseball Hall of Fame, and since 2011 has been a Guest Professor in the International Sports Law Program at the Instituto Superior de Derecho y Economia in Madrid, Spain. In addition to his most recent book, A People’s History of Baseball, he is authoring a chapter on law and politics for the upcoming textbook: Understanding Baseball: Approaches to the Scholarly Study of America’s Game (McFarland & Co., Inc., Publishers). His latest article, "Who Exempted Baseball, Anyway?: The Curious Development of the Antitrust Exemption that Never Was," will be published in the Spring, 2013 edition of the Harvard Journal of Sports and Entertainment Law.
Publications
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