Jodi S. Balsam

Biography

Jodi S. Balsam is a Professor of Clinical Law at Brooklyn Law School and a nationally recognized expert on Sports Law. She teaches Sports Law at both BLS and NYU School of Law, and has also taught the subject at New York Law School, University of New Hampshire School of Law, Bucerius Law School in Hamburg, Germany, Mathias Corvinus Collegium in Budapest, Hungary, and the MESGO Executive Masters Program in Global Sport Governance. She is also the founding director of the BLS Sports Law Externship Course, previously directed the law school externship program, and continues to teach externship seminars.

Professor Balsam frequently writes and speaks on sports law topics, including as co-author of Weiler’s Sports and the Law, a leading casebook in the field. Her scholarship has addressed antitrust challenges to sports leagues and organizing bodies, sports trademarks, athletes’ rights of free expression and name/image/likeness exploitation, sports gambling and integrity, sports league governance, and the role of the sports agent. She frequently appears in the media on legal issues in sports, including NBC Sports/The Golf Channel, ESPN, Law360 Sports and Betting, The Athletic, Front Office Sports, USA Today, and the Wall Street Journal. She is on the editorial boards of Law360-Sports & Betting, the Journal of Legal Aspects of Sport, and the international sports law newsletter LawInSport. At BLS, she serves as faculty advisor to the Brooklyn Entertainment and Sports Law Society and Brooklyn Sports and Entertainment Law Blog.

Professor Balsam has served as an arbitrator for the National Collegiate Athletic Association on complex infractions cases, and now serves as a neutral for FAIR Sports, which hears commercial cases involve college athlete name, image, and likeness. Before joining academia, Professor Balsam was the National Football League's Counsel for Operations and Litigation, where she managed litigation in all areas of law, oversaw a variety of policy and operational matters, negotiated and drafted contracts for League special events including the Super Bowl, and administered the League's internal dispute resolution processes and compliance program. Previously she was a litigation attorney with Simpson Thacher & Bartlett LLP, representing primarily sports and entertainment clients in antitrust matters and complex commercial litigation. She served as a law clerk for Judge Dennis Jacobs of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, and Judge Charles Brieant of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York.