Tag Archives | Instant Replay

Some people think that the constitutionality of the individual health care mandate is the most important legal issue of the day. But others clearly believe that it is the question of whether instant replay review of NFL referee calls should be conducted under a de novo standard. For those interested in this crucial issue, Texas lawprof Mitchell Berman has written a particularly thorough statement of the case for a de novo standard in this article on Slate.

I defended the same position in much lesser depth here and here. The second of my previous two posts on this subject has lots of links to arguments on both sides by other legal scholars. No one can say that we legal academics ignore the truly vital questions of the day. [...]

Duke Law Professor Joseph Blocher’s argument that NFL instant replay reviews should reconsider on-field calls de novo has resulted in an extensive debate. The Wall Street Journal law blog has a list of various links here. I endorsed Blocher’s argument in this post. There has also been a response by Josh Patashnik of the New Republic, which the WSJ survey didn’t include.

I still maintain, along with Blocher, that de novo review would increase the accuracy of calls at little or no cost to other important objectives. Some of the critics claim that instant replay calls aren’t likely to be any more accurate than those made on the field. This strikes me as extremely unlikely. An official in the instant replay booth can review the play from several different angles over the course of a minute. By contrast, an on-field call must often be made based on a split second glance. Even the best referees will sometimes have trouble figuring out exactly what happened. Moreover, as Blocher points out in his response to the critics, the NFL can certainly install more and better cameras in order to increase the accuracy of instant replay decisions still further. I am also unpersuaded by arguments that switching to de novo review would somehow undermine respect for NFL officials or lead to a breakdown of player discipline. Everyone already knows that NFL referees, like all sports officials, sometimes make mistakes; certainly the players and coaches know it. If anything, reducing the incidence of mistakes should increase respect for the system by both fans and players. And, as I noted in my original post, switching to de novo review won’t make games appreciably longer by increasing the number of instant replay challenges issued by coaches, since the rules give each coach [...]