{"id":474709,"date":"2026-02-14T15:34:08","date_gmt":"2026-02-14T15:34:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/474709\/"},"modified":"2026-02-14T15:34:08","modified_gmt":"2026-02-14T15:34:08","slug":"brian-flores-is-tearing-down-the-nfls-in-house-justice-system","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/474709\/","title":{"rendered":"Brian Flores is tearing down the NFL’s in-house justice system"},"content":{"rendered":"

When former Dolphins coach Brian Flores filed his lawsuit against the NFL and multiple teams in February 2022, the claim of systemic and chronic racial discrimination made it a landmark attack against the league. Flores\u2019s efforts have had, to date, a much more significant impact.<\/p>\n

Through a series of rulings during a four-year war over the question of whether the claims of Flores, Steve Wilks, and Ray Horton will be resolved in open court or (as the league strongly prefers) arbitration controlled by the Commissioner, Flores and company have torn down the league\u2019s longstanding method for forcing employee legal claims into a secret, rigged, kangaroo court.<\/p>\n

The problem is simple. The league wants civil cases filed against it to be determined not by an independent party but by the league itself. Finally, independent judges with the power to do so are telling the NFL that it cannot do so.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe court\u2019s decision recognizes that an arbitration forum in which the defendant\u2019s own chief executive gets to decide the case would strip employees of their rights under the law,\u201d attorneys Douglas H. Wigdor and David E. Gottlieb said Friday, after the latest decision scrapping the league\u2019s practices<\/a>. \u201cIt is long overdue for the NFL to recognize this and finally provide a fair, neutral and transparent forum for these issues to be addressed.\u201d<\/p>\n

And that\u2019s really the next step. Instead of maintaining its current Hail Mary pass<\/a> to the U.S. Supreme Court, the NFL should do the right thing and abandon the heavy-handed practice of insisting that lawsuits filed against the league be presided over by the Commissioner.<\/p>\n

The Commissioner, who recently defended the practice<\/a> by saying, essentially, \u201cit was like that when I got here,\u201d shouldn\u2019t want to do it. It\u2019s a hopeless and irreconcilable conflict of interest.<\/p>\n

Few if any other companies attempt to stack the deck in such a laughable, third world, banana republic way. Most companies realize it\u2019s more than sufficient to force employees into arbitration handled by one of the various companies (like the American Arbitration Association) that exist for that purpose. <\/p>\n

It\u2019s still a much better forum for corporate America than the traditional judge-and-jury process. Especially since the various companies that provide arbitration services tend to skew toward the interests of the businesses that are responsible for creating the system that funnels them so much business.<\/p>\n

But that\u2019s not good enough for the NFL. Its longstanding approach to arbitration is proof positive that it wants to completely control anything and everything it can.<\/p>\n

Finally, the NFL is losing control over legal claims made by non-players. The consequences sweep far beyond Flores, Wilks, and Horton. Every other team and league employee who is compelled to agree to the arbitration term in their contracts now have a pathway to avoiding a fundamentally unfair and un-American approach to justice.<\/p>\n

For that reason, maybe it will be useful for the league to keep pushing its appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court. Assuming that at least five of the nine justices of the highest court in the country see this game for what it is, the end result will be a published opinion that becomes the law of the land as to the league, all of its teams, and every current and future employee who have no choice but to agree to a contract that forces them to allow the Commissioner to have final say over any and all grievances they ever may pursue.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"When former Dolphins coach Brian Flores filed his lawsuit against the NFL and multiple teams in February 2022,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":474710,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[436],"tags":[49,48,514,82],"class_list":["post-474709","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-nfl","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-nfl","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/474709","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=474709"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/474709\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/474710"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=474709"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=474709"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=474709"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}