NCJ Number
152307
Date Published
1993
Length
285 pages
Annotation
The game of cricket embodies legal, ethical, and moral issues, particularly in the context of the similarity between cricket rules and procedures and social organization, violence at cricket games, litigation involving restrictive trade practices by team owners, and controversy over the tax status of game proceeds.
Abstract
Legal, ethical, and moral issues associated with the game of cricket represent distinct social phenomena that guide people's daily lives. Like all other games, cricket involves tensions between the game as a sport and the game as an embodiment of cultural lessons and broader messages. Every aspect of cricket contains and competes with its contradictions. Cricket has collective social meanings, depending on whether it is viewed as a capitalist enterprise or as a human community involving interpersonal relations. Traditional legal scholarship has tended to ignore interactions among sometimes competing and contradictory forms of social organization, either by adopting a strictly formalist division between law on the one hand and morality on the other hand or by defining concerns such as ethics and morality as high order issues and leaving them to a marginalized area of jurisprudence. Cricket can reveal much about the way people live and about the role and function of law in society. Consideration is given to cricket rules and procedures in the context of adjudication, and the game of cricket in all its facets is used to explain the meaning of life. Notes