For those of you who are football players, football player wannabees, parents of football players, spouses, children and siblings of football players, or lawyers who work on behalf of football players there is a surge afoot: a class-action suit claiming that, “The N.C.A.A. has engaged in a long-established pattern of negligence and inaction with respect to concussions and concussion-related maladies sustained by its student-athletes, all the while profiting immensely from those same student-athletes.”
George Vecsey writing for the NYTimes, "College Players Move Concussions Issue Into the Courtroom," details the story of a lawsuit filed in the United States District Court for the Northern District of Illinois on behalf of recent college football players. Excerpt.
"The legal action comes after a five-year flurry of awareness of brain injuries in contact sports and follows lawsuits filed this year by dozens of former N.F.L. players who claim the league was negligent in its handling of brain trauma. The issue has moved from science labs to Congress and now to courtrooms, where the financial exposure of the sport’s governing bodies may be tested."
When folks say that lawsuits are frivolous, you may agree and then point them in the direction of those lawsuits that have given us flame-retardant pajamas for children, labor laws that protect miners who toil miles below the surface of the earth we walk on, paint without lead that we can use on children's cribs and playpens, seatbelts that keep us from hurtling through the windshield of our car, clean produce, better agricultural, educational, medical and social practices, and so on.
As Margaret Mead reminded us, "Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it's the only thing that ever does."
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