The legal question underneath the Fanatics trading-card lawsuit was never about cardboard. It was about who owns the commercial afterlife of an athlete's image, and whether consolidation of that ownership can be challenged in court. A New York federal judge dismissed the case in March 2026, ruling that plaintiffs failed to show they'd been harmed by Fanatics' alleged monopoly over the card market. That outcome might look like a dead end. But the gap between the value athletes generate and the value they capture has a longer legal history than any single antitrust complaint, and the sharpest account of how that gap gets tested in an actual courtroom comes from someone who lived it.
The Fanatics dismissal is hard to think clearly about because the legal theories available to plaintiffs in consumer antitrust cases are narrow. You have to prove you paid more than you would have in a competitive market, which means quantifying a hypothetical. Athletes whose likenesses appear on those cards occupy a different legal position entirely, but the doctrinal paths to vindicate their interests are scattered across antitrust law, right-of-publicity statutes, and contract doctrine. Courts have been inconsistent about which framework applies. The NCAA spent decades arguing that amateurism itself was a legal defense. Leagues and licensors today operate under different justifications, but a small number of entities still control the commercial pipeline for athlete likenesses. Understanding how one person cracked open that arrangement matters more now than it did five years ago.
Ed O'Bannon's account in *Court Justice*, co-written with legal analyst Michael McCann and journalist Jeremy Schaap, starts with a scene that is almost absurdly ordinary. In 2009, a friend's son showed O'Bannon a copy of NCAA Basketball 09. There, on screen, was a virtual version of him: same height, same left-handedness, same UCLA jersey number. The game was still selling. O'Bannon, who had been out of professional basketball for years and was working at a car dealership in Las Vegas, had never been asked for permission and had never been paid.
What followed was a class-action lawsuit that became the first serious judicial examination of the NCAA's amateurism model as an antitrust problem. O'Bannon's legal team, led by attorneys including Michael Hausfeld, argued that the NCAA's rules prohibiting athlete compensation for use of their names, images, and likenesses constituted an illegal restraint of trade. The NCAA countered that amateurism was essential to its product and that compensating athletes would destroy the distinction between college and professional sports.
The case went to trial in 2014 before Judge Claudia Wilken in Oakland, and the testimony was damaging to the NCAA's position: officials struggled under cross-examination to explain why amateurism required zero compensation rather than, say, a trust fund or a modest stipend. O'Bannon writes with a bluntness that can feel flat in places where a more polished memoirist might have added emotional shading. He describes the years of depositions, the pressure from former teammates who thought he was being foolish, the financial strain of sustaining a lawsuit against an institution with functionally unlimited legal resources. There is no triumphalism here. The Ninth Circuit ultimately scaled back Judge Wilken's ruling, removing the provision that would have allowed schools to pay athletes up to $5,000 per year in deferred compensation. O'Bannon won, and the victory was immediately constrained. One weakness worth naming: the treatment of legal mechanics is too thin. McCann provides context, but the explanation of how antitrust law's rule-of-reason analysis actually works in practice skims over doctrinal details that would help you understand why courts are so reluctant to intervene in sports-governance disputes. If you come to this looking for a legal treatise, you will need supplementary reading. The book is strongest as a first-person record of what it feels like to become a test case: the grinding pace, the small humiliations, the sense that you are fighting an institution that can simply wait you out. Still, O'Bannon's case did something concrete. It established in federal court that the NCAA's blanket prohibition on athlete compensation was subject to antitrust scrutiny, a finding the Supreme Court later reinforced in NCAA v. Alston in 2021. The line from O'Bannon's lawsuit to the current world of NIL deals is direct and documented. And the central question he raised, whether an organization can indefinitely monetize someone's likeness under rules that person had no meaningful power to negotiate, is precisely the question that keeps surfacing in disputes involving leagues, licensors, and companies like Fanatics.
The commercial value of athlete likenesses is not shrinking. Exclusive licensing deals, digital collectibles, and video game integrations keep expanding the revenue pool. The legal frameworks governing who controls that value remain unstable. *Court Justice* is a first-person record of the case that first forced those frameworks into open court, and an honest account of what it costs a person to be the plaintiff. Worth picking up if you want the story behind the precedent, told by the person who had the most to lose.