A 3-judge panel of Nevada’s Supreme Courtroom on Tuesday sided with the NFL in opposition to former Las Vegas Raiders coach Jon Gruden, saying that he was topic to arbitration at the same time as a former worker and thus ineligible to sue the league over his 2021 termination.
Justices Elissa F. Cadish and Kristina Pickering reversed a district courtroom’s order that denied the NFL’s movement to pressure Gruden’s criticism into its arbitration course of. The case was remanded to the decrease courtroom with an order to grant the arbitration movement.
Justice Linda Marie Bell disagreed with the bulk’s interpretation of the arbitration clause within the NFL Structure, siding with Gruden’s attorneys who argued that it doesn’t apply to former workers.
“I disagree with their conclusion as a result of the information of this case don’t assist survival of the clause previous the tip of Gruden’s employment,” Bell wrote in her dissent.
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Gruden’s lawsuit accuses the NFL and commissioner Roger Goodell of “immediately leaking” racist and misogynistic emails in an try to hurt Gruden’s fame and pressure him out as coach of the Raiders in October 2021.
Gruden filed his lawsuit in November 2021, weeks after resigning beneath stress when a few of his emails from greater than a decade earlier had been printed by The Wall Avenue Journal and The New York Occasions. The emails had surfaced within the league’s investigation of then-Washington Commanders proprietor Daniel Snyder.
Gruden informed ESPN final yr that the league “thought they might cherry-pick emails from years in the past, once I wasn’t even a coach, and attempt to finish my profession.” On the time, league spokesman Brian McCarthy informed ESPN that “neither the NFL nor the commissioner leaked Coach Gruden’s offensive emails.”
The NFL has argued for courts to toss out Gruden’s declare, saying a clause in his contract with the Raiders required him to file his declare by way of league arbitration.
Gruden lawyer Adam Hosmer-Henner argued that arbitration, a course of that’s managed by the NFL and the place any discovery wouldn’t be made public, can be unfair to his shopper as a result of Gruden is not a league worker.
Hosmer-Henner mentioned Gruden would search a listening to earlier than all seven justices of the Nevada Supreme Courtroom.
“The panel’s break up determination would go away Nevada an outlier the place an employer can unilaterally decide whether or not an worker’s dispute should go to arbitration and likewise permit the employer to adjudicate the dispute because the arbitrator,” Hosmer-Henner mentioned.
Lawyer Kannon Shanmugam, representing the NFL, declined to touch upon the ruling.
ESPN Senior Author Don Van Natta Jr. and The Related Press contributed to this report.