Lawyer Peter Ginsberg has been a busy man.
One day after he accompanied temporarily unsuspended Saints linebacker Jonathan Vilma for a meeting with NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell, Ginsberg filed on behalf of suspended Broncos linebacker D.J. Williams an appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court of the failed lawsuit challenging the suspension.
Per a source with knowledge of the situation, Williams is challenging the decision of a federal appeals court that his six-game suspension resulted from a fair and appropriate application of the league’s internal arbitration procedures.
Victory won’t keep Williams from being suspended; he’s already served two of six games for producing a non-human urine sample for steroids testing. But if Williams wins, he’ll get his six game checks (i.e., $1.76 million), along with a measure of public vindication.
It won’t be easy. The U.S. Supreme Court accepts only a small fraction of the appeals it receives. Typically, the Supreme Court gets involved only if there’s a discrepancy among the various federal appeals courts, or when the violation of law is particularly egregious.
Maybe, eventually, the conflict among the federal appeals court will come from Vilma’s attack in Louisiana on the same internal arbitration procedures that D.J. Williams is challenging.