Michael McCann

Professor Michael McCann is one of the nation's leading experts in sports law, a seasoned sports attorney, and an award-winning teacher and scholar. He received tenure at Vermont Law School in 2010 and is founder and director of the Sports Law Institute (SLI). He manages the SLI's groundbreaking Blue Chips Program, which provides students with the core skills and hands-on experience needed to succeed in the sports world. He receives counsel from SLI's dynamic Board of Advisers, which includes some of the nation's sports industry leaders.

Professor McCann also is an award-winning journalist and broadcaster. He is Sports Illustrated's legal analyst, the sports law columnist on SI.com (CNNSI), and the on-air legal analyst for NBA TV. His sports law commentary has attracted national acclaim, with honors from The American Lawyer, the Newhouse School of Public Communications, and the Society for Social Psychology and Personality (2011 Media Prize) for excellence in journalism and broadcasting. He is a prolific and frequently cited writer. As of June 2012, he is the author of 18 law review articles and 160 legal columns and investigative articles for Sports Illustrated and SI.com. His law review articles have been published in the Yale Law Journal, Wisconsin Law Review, and Boston College Law Review, among other prominent law reviews. One recent and notable article is American Needle v. NFL: An Opportunity to Reshape Sports Law, 119 YALE LAW JOURNAL 726 (2010).

In addition to his sports law expertise, Professor McCann is an expert in media and broadcasting law, antitrust law, contract law, criminal law, law and psychology, food and drug law, and law and analytics. Along with Jon Hanson, the Alfred Smart Professor of Law at Harvard Law School, he is co-founder of The Project on Law and Mind Sciences at Harvard Law School. He has also taught a sports law and analytics reading group at Yale Law School, the first such course to be offered at any law school, and sports law and administrative law courses at Boston College Law School. He was chair of the Association of American Law School's Section on Law and Sports in 2008.

Professor McCann is the Distinguished Visiting Hall of Fame Professor of Law at Mississippi College School of Law, where he was an assistant professor of law from 2005 to 2008 and continues to teach a sports law course every summer. He also received that school's most prestigious awards for teaching, including the Professor of the Year Award in 2007 and 2008 and the Professor of the Year for First-Year Courses Award in 2006, 2007, and 2008. Also in 2008, he was honored with the Phi Delta Phi Professor of the Year Award and his colleagues named him the recipient of the Shirley Norwood Jones Faculty Award.

Professor McCann is a legal correspondent for the nationally syndicated Dan Patrick Show and he has been frequently interviewed on television programs, including HBO's Bob Costas Now; CNN's The Situation Room with Wolf Blitzer, American Morning, and Headline News; the Glenn Beck Show; CBS News's The Early Show; Fox News' Fox Live Desk and Fox Report with Shepard Smith; MSNBC's NewsNation with Tamron Hall; CNBC's Morning Call and Power Lunch; Al Jazeera's nightly news program; and Fuji TV's Tokudane. He has also been interviewed on NPR, BBC, CBC, CBS Radio, ESPN Radio, the Lou Dobbs Radio Show, and the Jim Rome Show, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, and Business Week. Additionally, he contributes to two award-winning blogs: Sports Law Blog (of which he is editor-in-chief and publisher) and The Situationist.

Prior to becoming a law professor, Professor McCann served as counsel to college football star Maurice Clarett in his lawsuit against the National Football League and its age eligibility rule (Clarett v. NFL, 369 F.3d 124 (2nd Cir. 2004); cert. denied, 125 S. Ct. 1728 (2005)). He also served as a visiting researcher at Harvard Law School and legal counsel to U.S. Rep. Marty Meehan. Professor McCann is a regular panelist at the MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conferences.  He is active on Twitter at @McCannSportsLaw.

He received his LLM from Harvard Law School, his JD from the University of Virginia School of Law, and his BA, magna cum laude, from Georgetown University. At Virginia, he was named a Hardy Cross Dillard Fellow, served as editor-in-chief of the Virginia Sports and Entertainment Law Journal, and received the law school's Best Oral Advocacy Award.