Roger I. Abrams

Professor Abrams is a prolific author and leading authority on sports and labor law and legal education. He has served as a salary arbitrator for major league baseball and as a permanent arbitrator for the television, communications, electronics and coal industries, for the US Customs Service, Internal Revenue Service, Walt Disney World and Lockheed-Martin Company.

Professor Abrams has published five books on the business and history of sports: Legal Bases: Baseball and the Law (1998), The Money Pitch: Baseball Free Agency and Salary Arbitration (2000), The First World Series and the Baseball Fanatics of 1903 (2003) and The Dark Side of the Diamond: Gambling, Violence, Drugs and Alcoholism in the National Pastime (2008). His most recent book, Sports Justice, was published in 2010.

Professor Abrams was appointed to lead the law school in July 1999 and stepped down in 2002. He served as dean of both Rutgers University's law school in Newark, New Jersey, and Nova University Shepard Broad Law Center in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, before coming to Northeastern. He began his academic career on the faculty of Case Western Reserve University School of Law in Cleveland, Ohio, where he became the youngest tenured full professor in the history of that university. After graduating from Harvard Law School cum laude in 1970, he clerked for Judge Frank M. Coffin of the US Court of Appeals for the First Circuit in Boston, and then practiced with the Boston firm of Foley, Hoag & Eliot in the areas of labor law and civil rights litigation. Professor Abrams is an elected member of the American Law Institute, the American Bar Foundation, the National Academy of Arbitrators and the Massachusetts Historical Society.