I've read part of and skimmed the rest of the the 5th Circuit's opinion.
I'm too old to write a law review article, but if I ever do I already have a title: "The Jurisdiction Fetish."
For the nonlawyers, there's a concept in the law called "jurisdiction," which is perhaps the most bloated, over used, rarely regarded, and stupid doctrines in the law. It is billed in law school as this major doctrine of "separation of powers" on which the entire fate of the republic depends. There is something to that. I'm not disputing that under the constitution, there are limits on what certain courts should be able to do.
But it has gotten so far out of hand, and the reverence with which we treat these "jurisdictional" concepts have become so absurd and divorced from the business of courts that it has become laughable.
In this case, the NFLPA filed their complaint early. But the judge didn't rule until after the arbitrator ruled. There is absolutely no difference between what the judge would have decided if the NFLPA had filed a few days later and what it decided. Even if the original complaint was early, by the time anyone got around to considering it, it was timely. What are we doing? Doesn't that sound stupid?
Well, the court has an answer: Jurisdiction is decided at the time of filing, not later. This is a general principle that very serious and very smart lawyers will say with great reverence without spending even a half second asking, "why"? There actually are good reasons for it, in certain cases. But, mostly, it's dumb. It's made up. You don't find it in the constitution. It's there because in occasional cases you could abuse the rule otherwise, by like moving to create something called "diversity jurisdiction." But, you know, I actually have faith that judges can figure out when it's being abused. There was nothing to exhaust here.
This opinion is everything that's bad about the law. The NFL made its arguments, the NFLPA made its arguments. The judge considered them, issued a decision, and everything was done exactly like it's supposed to be done. To say that the opinion disappears on a technicality overstates it. It's not even a technicality. It's artificial reverence to make-believe rules that arise over a concept that has been divorced from its meaning just because.