Florida State and the Atlantic Coast Conference returned to a Tallahassee courtroom Wednesday to help answer an obvious but crucial question in their half-a-billion-dollar dueling lawsuits.
How long should those dueling cases keep playing out in both Florida and North Carolina?
The ACC’s argument before Florida’s First District Court of Appeal: FSU’s lawsuit in Leon County should be on hold while the ACC’s lawsuit proceeds in North Carolina. FSU, naturally, disagreed.
The three-judge panel did not issue a ruling during the session, which lasted less than an hour.
There were, however, three interesting broad questions that surfaced.
Does this dispute belong in Florida or North Carolina?
The ACC’s counsel, Alan Lawson, said the choice is clear. The dispute involves a contract from North Carolina with a North Carolina-based organization made up of schools from multiple states who all come to North Carolina for their common enterprise.
“You have to be wearing garnet-and-gold-colored lenses to come up with Tallahassee as the answer for the most natural place for that contract dispute,” Lawson said.
FSU’s outside counsel, Elliot H. Scherker, had another option: sovereign immunity, which gives some legal protections to state entities like FSU. Does it make sense for a court in another state to rule on the sovereign immunity of a Florida entity? The ACC could have sued — and still could sue — FSU in a Florida court.
Who’s the real plaintiff?
Because the plaintiff is the one filing a suit — not being sued — it’s usually the party that was wronged and gets to pick the venue. Both sides claim that role is theirs.
The ACC, Lawson said, is the only party seeking damages in the dispute, which is a point in his conference’s favor. The league has also argued that FSU breached its contracts by preparing to challenge the ACC’s grant of rights and related documents. That would also make the conference a proper plaintiff.
Scherker put it differently. The dispute centers on who owns the broadcast rights to FSU home games if/when the Seminoles leave the ACC. Those broadcast rights, Scherker said, are “quintessentially Florida property” involving a state entity. FSU is trying to stop the ACC from taking and using that property.
“That, to me, is a natural plaintiff if there ever was one,” Scherker said.
What happens if courts in different states make conflicting rulings?
That’s a question that has lingered over previous hearings and was raised multiple times Wednesday. The answers remain unsatisfying.
Florida State’s counsel said he didn’t “have an answer to that speculative possibility” but that precedents allow for it. Courts can consider exceptional circumstances when weighing whether to pause a case. The possibility of differing rulings, Scherker said, “doesn’t trump exceptional circumstances in a given case.”
The answer from the ACC’s attorney was … more litigation. After all the appeals and judgments are issued, Lawson said there will be “additional litigation in which we find out which judgment isn’t worth the paper that it’s written on.”
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