From Student Athlete to Sports Attorney
Janet Judge (’93) built her career in sports law by advising the NCAA on Title IX issues and creating opportunities for student athletes.
As a law student, Janet Judge (’93) knew she needed some balance in her life. She didn’t want to be thinking about the law 24 hours a day. She wanted to make sure she had another outlet.
So she split her time between the grueling schedule of a BU Law student and coaching two different sports at a nearby college.
“It was one of the best decisions I’ve ever made in my life,” she recalls of her decision to coach soccer and basketball at Simmons College. “I knew myself well enough to know that I needed something outside of law school…so it just was another way to really manage my time. When I was an undergraduate I played sports the whole time I went to college, and so that was a natural extension of that kind of structured approach to learning and playing.”
As a sports attorney, Judge was able to take two things she loved and combine them into a career. Earlier this year, Judge received the 2017 Guiding Woman in Sport Award from the Society of Health and Physical Educators (SHAPE) at the SHAPE National Convention and Expo in Boston. It’s an honor she shares with people like tennis star Billie Jean King, basketball coach C. Vivian Stringer, and journalist Robin Roberts.
“It feels pretty nice,” Judge says. “It’s a pretty impressive honor and I was very much caught off guard and pretty humbled by it.”
A Proud Graduate
As an undergrad at Harvard, Judge played soccer and basketball, going with her soccer team to three NCAA tournaments. “I’m particularly proud that I had the opportunity to participate in the first-ever women’s national soccer championship in Colorado Springs in 1980.”
After graduating, she spent some time as assistant athletic director at Harvard. A lot of her work revolved around studying the NCAA rulebook to ensure the program was in compliance. After a few years of that, she says, law school seemed like a logical next step: “I decided that state and federal law couldn’t be any more complicated than the NCAA Manual.”
Judge is “a proud graduate” of BU Law. “I had a wonderful experience there with phenomenal faculty,” she recalls. “Pnina Lahav and my constitutional law class is something that I draw on to this day. And also I had the great opportunity to be a research assistant for Avi Soifer, who is now the dean of the University of Hawaii Law School…. He’s a First Amendment scholar and I learned a great deal from him that I also use in my practice today.”
After law school, she clerked for Judge Norman Stahl on the US Court of Appeals for the First Circuit. “Judge Stahl is a tremendous mentor for his clerks,” Judge says. “He sat me down and asked me what I thought I was going to be doing in my life, and I talked a little bit about all the things that I really loved doing and the Judge said right away, ‘Janet, you absolutely love sports, and you absolutely love law. Figure out a way to put the two together.’ ”
During her time with Judge Stahl, the court saw a number of significant decisions related to athletics, most notably a Title IX lawsuit by female athletes against Brown University: “And that was the case that made me think ‘well, there’s a way to really be thinking about the legal considerations that go into an athlete’s day-to-day experience in collegiate athletics.’ ”
An Exploding Field
When she started out, the world of sports law was not as well-defined as it is today, and there weren’t many women in the field. She’s worked hard to make a name for herself, and ended up writing the NCAA Gender Equity Manual:
“After I finished clerking and I started working in private practice and I was a labor and employment and civil rights litigator. I’ve always been very interested in Title IX, and I reached out to the NCAA and said I would write or speak at any event they had where there was discussion of [the act]. At the time there were not many attorneys or really not many people who had any sort of expertise in this area, and I started speaking at inclusion forums of the NCAA and doing other things. Because I started doing so much work in the area, the NCAA reached out to me and my colleague, Tim O’Brien, whom I also worked with at the time, to ask whether or not we’d be interested in working on the manual.”
These days, the field she chose—and helped to shape—has “exploded,” she says, with attorneys and opportunities. More and more lawyers, both men and women, are including sports law in their areas of practice. In 2007, Judge started her own law firm, Sports Law Associates LLC.
Things have especially changed in the past five years. In the wake of the Penn State University case, in which a former assistant football coach was convicted of sexually abusing minors and several administrators were found to have had knowledge of the abuse, college presidents and their boards started to think in new ways about oversight when it came to athletics. Judge works with a lot of K–12 schools, colleges and universities, advising them on a variety of issues, especially related to Title IX: “A lot of my work in the last couple years has been working with both coaches and student athletes around areas of risk in intercollegiate athletics. So anything from sexual misconduct to athletic equity, hazing, harassment, social media, a whole variety of things.”
Sexual misconduct has been one major focus of her work. Though a lot of high-profile cases have come up in recent years, Judge believes that colleges and universities are working hard to open lines of communication on the issue between athletes and their institutions and have effective conversations about sexual misconduct. “What I’m hearing from student athletes in particular across the country is that they want more opportunities to have discussions and not just be talked at. And they have a lot of interesting and wonderful things to say.”
An Exciting Future
This past year, Judge joined the firm Holland & Knight as a partner: “I’m proud that this very good firm with an incredible higher education practice had the trust in me and my practice to ask me to join,” she says.
With her new employer, she plans to continue working hard doing what she loves.
“I just look forward to staying in the game and working very hard to help colleges and universities continue to offer the best opportunities to their athletes while also supporting their coaches and staff,” she says.