Legal Writing and Battlin' Bulldog Beer

In the South, football is religion, so it's no surprise that there's an Eleventh Circuit opinion full of football metaphors and references. In the 1980s, the University of Georgia sued a local brewer who was selling Battlin' Bulldog beer in a red and black can featuring a beer-

Photo courtesy of eBay seller betweenthehedges1980

swigging bulldog that strongly resembled the University's bulldog mascot.

The Eleventh Circuit described the beer maker’s hope that the beer would “pile up yardage and score big points” in the beer market, “kick[ed] off” its discussion by noting it would only be deciding whether the district court properly applied the Lanham Act, and concluded that while the beer maker had a clever “entrepreneurial game plan,” the University of Georgia was able to hold it to “little or no gain."

This case and others are part of my article Riding the Bench--A Look at Sports Metaphors in Judicial Opinions which is forthcoming this fall in the Harvard Journal of Sports and Entertainment Law.

Happy Football Season!