Sports Law: A Global Legal Order?

Abstract

The “global” dimension of sport is, in the first instance, regulatory, and it embraces the whole complex of norms produced and implemented by regulatory sporting regimes at the international and domestic levels. These rules include not only private norms set by the International Olympic Committee (IOC) and by International Federations (IFs) but also “hybrid” public-private norms approved by the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) and international law (such as the UNESCO Convention Against Doping in Sport). Sports law, therefore, is highly heterogeneous, and, above all, it is not simply transnational, but actually “global”. Furthermore, this law represents an autonomous global legal order, which displays distinctive features such as the presence of some separation of powers (in particular quasi-judicial, with the strategic role played by the Court of Arbitration for Sport) and the development of relevant procedural principles (e.g. fairness and due process); and these principles operate both in rulemaking procedures (e.g. the adoption of the WADA Code) and in adjudicatory ones (e.g. for disciplinary measures). Finally, this global legal order is made up with several international regulatory regimes, both private – such as the Olympic movement – and hybrid public and private – such as the world anti-doping regime. The formula “global sports law” thus covers all definitions so far provided by legal scholarship (such as lex sportiva or “international sports law”) in order to describe the principles and rules developed and applied by sporting institutions. This approach raises several problems concerning the very concept of such a kind of law and its binding force as well as other problems, including those connected to wider themes such as the emergence of a “global private law” and the formation of “global private regimes” (this is the case, for instance, of international sports federations and their rules). The analysis of the global sports legal order, therefore, allows us to shed light on broader global governance trends affecting, for example, the institutional design of global regimes with specific regard to separation of powers and the emergence of judicial activities.