Second amicus opposes both parties: the draft is a derivatives market, and 10 p.m. is after-hours trading
Larry Florio, League member and father of two, files in support of neither party. He asks for 8:30, a timelock on decrees, and to be treated as "the class representative the appellant forgot to be."
A second amicus brief was filed Wednesday night, this one in support of neither party. Its author, Larry Florio, is a League member, a securities and derivatives lawyer, and the father of two young children. SCOFFblog notes for the record that he is also the proprietor of this publication, a connection the brief says he “denies” and about which “he checks the traffic hourly.” SCOFFblog has no comment.
Florio’s brief was filed before Samir Patel’s motion to intervene and makes several of the same points, which the Court is treating as a coalition rather than a coincidence.
The position
“This case began as a dispute between a member who wanted a 10:00 p.m. draft and a Commissioner who did not want to grant it. It has ended with a member who has a 10:00 p.m. draft and a Commissioner who says he did not grant it. The parties have resolved their differences by converging on the one outcome that injures everyone else. That is not a settlement. That is a coalition.”
The interest of amicus is stated plainly: “He has a stake in when the Draft ends. Under the relief the parties have now agreed on, it ends at approximately 12:45 a.m.” His children will wake him at 5:30 a.m. “regardless of what this Court decides.”
Four arguments
The class was settled without notice. The appellant certified a class of two, settled “in principle” with the defendant, and dismissed. Rule 23(e) requires notice and court approval; “the first the League heard of the settlement was the settlement.” Florio cites In re League Dues, 4 F.F. 11 (2026), the appellant’s own authority, for the proposition that obligations are suspended “pending further review,” and “requests the review.”
The relief is overbroad. Back-to-School Night is ninety minutes; 8:30 covers it. The appellant “did not want a narrower remedy because a narrower remedy would not have made 660,000 people read his motion. Amicus does not begrudge him that. He asks only that the League’s Wednesday not be the cost.”
Bedtimes are not a standard of review. The Commissioner denied the motion because he did not want to, then granted it for his daughter’s bedtime. “‘I don’t want to’ is at least a rule. It applies to everyone. ‘My daughter’s bedtime’ is a rule that applies to one household.” If bedtimes count, amicus has two, and the relevant constraint is not bedtime but wake-up, “which is 5:30 a.m., is enforced by persons possessing even greater arbitrary authority than the Commissioner, and does not move for fantasy football.” A footnote, “because it is his field and he cannot help it,” observes that the buy-in is an investment contract under Howey and the decree “a material change … disclosed to some holders in a group chat and denied (‘I grant nothing’) to the rest.”
The draft is a derivatives market. Answering Patel’s admin-key analogy, Florio offers one “closer to home”: each roster slot is a contract on an underlying the holder does not control, the waiver wire is the secondary market, trades are bilateral swaps cleared by a clearinghouse “that clears when it feels like it,” and the draft is the primary issuance. The Commissioner “therefore operates a designated contract market. He has never registered it. He has never published a rulebook; Article I, ‘The Commissioner decides,’ is cited by everyone and produced by no one. He has never adopted position limits, which is why someone will end the night holding three tight ends.” A 10:00 p.m. start is “after-hours trading in an illiquid instrument,” a “market structure designed to transfer value from the people who went to bed to the people who did not.” The brief does not ask the Court to apply the Commodity Exchange Act, “which does not bind the League and would not survive contact with it,” only the principle: “Markets have hours because the people in them have lives.”
Mootness and remedy
Florio joins the Court on mootness and adds that the decree “injured every other member, none of whom had a grievance until Wednesday afternoon. The controversy has not ended. It has changed hands.” He asks to be treated as an intervenor “or, in the alternative, as the class representative the appellant forgot to be.”
The remedy borrows from Patel and inverts it: “If the Commissioner is an owner address with no timelock, the answer is not to affirm him. It is to give him a timelock.” Amicus asks the Court to vacate the decree, set 8:30 p.m., alternatively hold the original time with the two class members on autodraft (“the results of which the Court should expect to be an improvement”), impose 24 hours’ notice on future scheduling decrees, and retain jurisdiction, “because the Commissioner has told the Court exactly what he thinks of its orders and the Court should take him at his word.”
The brief is signed “League Member, Father of Two, Asleep by 10:30, and Proprietor of a Blog He Denies Operating.”
The Court’s note
The Court now has before it two parties who agree with each other and two League members who agree with neither. It observes that the amicus practice in this case has been more adversarial than the litigation, and that the only person who has not filed anything is David Lopez-Kurtz, who remains the class.