Wednesday, September 11, starts the first part of the next round in the battles between the ACC and member schools Florida State and Clemson. The next round? Already? Wednesday will see the oral arguments in front of the Florida First District Court of Appeal. The ACC is getting the first appeals shot in the legal merry-go-round.
Appeals Background
The appeal in front of the three-judge panel is very specific in its intent. The ACC is challenging court rulings by lower court judge John Cooper. Cooper denied the conference’s motion to stray or pause the case in Leon County, Florida.
The appeal is coming much faster than those in any of the other legal fights in Pickens, South Carolina, and Charlotte, North Carolina. The ACC filed the appeal before Judge Cooper issued his final ruling on a litany of issues in June.
The conference filed a motion to dismiss Florida State’s lawsuit. The motion seeks to dispose of the Grant of Rights and allow the school to leave the conference. The same motions were filed by the ACC in Pickens, South Carolina in the matter of Clemson v. The ACC. Florida State and Clemson filed similar motions to dismiss in Charlotte where the ACC is the plaintiff in two cases.
But this one jumped up, in part, because of when the ACC filed it. The motion to dismiss all the other cases took one day. Then, a varying degree of time for the ruling. Finally, the sides had to wait for the order to be written (often a few weeks). After that, they can file an appeal.
The Filing Specifics
But in Leon County, Judge Cooper took three full-day hearings to get to the point of the motion to dismiss. In the interim, he had denied the ACC’s motion to stay or pause the proceedings. So, the ACC filed an appeal based on that before we even got to the end of the third hearing and the denial of their motion to dismiss.
The 54-page filing by the ACC says Judge Cooper committed a “Judicial foul.” The filing claims, “In this high-profile lawsuit over the interpretation of college sports contracts, the trial court judge committed a judicial foul. It ignored this Court’s binding precedent on the principle of priority that require staying this case pending the disposition of a priority North Carolina lawsuit between the same parties over the same contracts.”
The conference’s filing reminds the court that it, the ACC, filed first in Mecklenburg County, NC. This was before Florida State moved forward with its case. Again, both cases in North Carolina are already on the appellate track based on jurisdiction and sovereign immunity issues. The ACC contends the Leon County case needs to wait until the NC issues are resolved.
The stay would put a stop to all discovery and other work in the case until the appeals on the motion to dismiss are completed.
