Baseball and the law.

"Whoever wants to know the heart and mind of America had better learn baseball."

So wrote French philosopher Jacques Barzum in a 1954 book, "God's Country and Mine."

Maybe he should have written that whoever wants to know about American law should learn baseball.

That's the approach taken by a Broward County judge and a Nova Southeastern law professor who have just published Baseball and the Law, a 1,040-page textbook intended to spark teaching the subject at law schools, and just maybe provide some entertaining and educational reading for the baseball-afflicted lawyers.

"You could teach an entire law school curriculum and use nothing but baseball," said the judge, Louis Schiff.

The gamut runs from labor issues (the first players union was organized in the late 1800s by a player/lawyer), building stadiums, antitrust, domestic violence, women who have shaped baseball (including women sports writers getting into locker rooms), civil rights (integrating baseball), marketing, game-related injuries to fans, movies, and numerous other topics.

"There's a case out of Missouri about a flying hot dog," Schiff observed.

The story of how the two authors, one a Yankees fan and the other a Mets aficionado, who live in the same small Broward County town, came to collaborate is like some of the lore in their book.

Robert Jarvis, the Nova Law professor, sits on the advisory board of Carolina Academic Press, which publishes legal textbooks. Jarvis had already written several textbooks, including one on sports law, as well as numerous articles (including one titled, "Legal Tales from Gilligan's Island").

"They came to me and said, 'We'd like to do a baseball book,'" he said.

So he began to look around to see what was available. He found there were a few baseball law courses--the University of Michigan had one, as did the University of Virginia and Rutgers. When he was a law professor, Arkansas Supreme Court Chief Justice Howard Brill had taught one at the University of Arkansas. So had Alan Dershowitz shortly before he retired from Harvard.

But while each instructor assembled a list of reading materials, there was no textbook.

"Putting together materials is a daunting, daunting task. It takes forever. That's why most of these types of elective courses never get off the ground," Jarvis said.

One of the courses Jarvis found in his research was at Mitchell Hamline School of Law taught in the summer by one of its alumni: Judge Schiff. He had also taught similar...