Believe it or not, the Mitchell Report on steroid use in Major League Baseball may present an interesting international choice-of-law issue. As Roger Alford notes at Opinio Juris, the report presumes that all steroid use that would have been illegal if performed in the United States was illegal, even though some of the alleged offenses occurred in other countries. As Alford notes:

Problem is, under traditional rules of extraterritoriality, the federal regulation of the use of performance enhancing substances does not obviously apply when such use occurs in other countries. And various sections of the Mitchell Report detail allegations of "illegal" use in Canada, Venezuela, and the Dominican Republic.

I am not suggesting that the use of those substances is permitted in any of those countries. But from my reading of the Mitchell Report, it appears that the report omits materially relevant information about the governing law regarding the use of those substances outside the United States. There is almost no mention of Canadian law, and there is no mention whatsoever of Venezuelan law, Dominican Republic law, or for that matter, the 1971 Convention on Psychotropic Substances. Nor is there any explicit reference to the extraterritorial application of federal law to regulate the use of these substances abroad.

The syllogism drawn from the Mitchell Report appears to be that (1) Major League Baseball's drug policy prohibits the use of "illegal" substances, (2) "illegal" substances are defined by reference to federal law, and (3) therefore, the use by any player of performance enhancing substances anywhere in the world violates Major League Baseball's drug policy.

Alford is willing to be convinced that this syllogism is correct, but he does not find it to be self-evident.