Clipping:A comparison of the judicial rulings on the reserve
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| Date | Wednesday, March 26, 1890 |
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| Text | [editorial matter] Judge O'Brien based his refusal of a preliminary injunction against Ward on the construction of the contract itself, which he considered unconscionable, lacking in mutuality, indefinite and uncertain. Judge Thayer reached virtually the same conclusion. Judge O'Brien, however, was so ambiguous in his references to the famous eighteen paragraph relating to reservation or option—on which paragraph the League rested its entire case—as to lead the League people to consider it a sort of judicial recognition of the reserve rule, and to hope for favorable results in other courts. But in jumping to this conclusion they simply deluded themselves, as was pointed out in The Sporting Life of Feb. 4, in which Judge O'Brien's decision was so exhaustively reviewed, the results of it so clearly pointed out, and Judge Thayer's decision really so fully anticipated, as to make extended further comment here unnecessary. Judge Thayer in his thorough analysis of the contract, and the sparing language with which he lays bare its many flaws, shows the League people conclusively not only that they have really no contract that will hold good in law anywhere, but that they need not hope for any legal recognition of the reserve rule as it has been practiced in the past. The decisions of Judges O'Brien and Thayer show that a sort of reservation agreed to in an equitable contract could probably be enforced, but to make such enforcement possible, the terms of reservation would have to be so explici8t, so certain, as to make a one-year contract virtually a two-year contract, and so equitable as to defeat and render useless the reserve rule, whose purpose is to simply hold the player to a club from season to season, in order to keep it intact, without entailing enforceable legal obligations upon the club owners. |
| Source | Sporting Life |
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| Submitted by | Richard Hershberger |
| Origin | Initial Hershberger Clippings |
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