Landis, Kenesaw Mountain

(1866–1944) judge, baseball commissioner; born in Millville, Ohio. A lawyer appointed federal district judge in Chicago in 1905, Landis gained attention for his dramatic $30-million ruling against Standard Oil (later reversed) and for patriotic cases connected with the Espionage Act of 1917. As baseball's autocratic first commissioner (1920–44), he banned for life eight players who had previously been acquitted in the "Black Sox" scandal of 1919. He earned his reputation for integrity and for reestablishing the reputation and integrity of baseball, but his insistence on excluding African-Americans from organized baseball prevented their participation in the national pastime until after his death. He was inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame in 1939.

References in periodicals archive

(133.) Landis, Kenesaw Mountain, in Biographical Directory of Federal Judges, www.fjc.gov/public/home.nsf/hisj (Federal Judicial Center, accessed 10 October 2009); Kenesaw Mountain Landis, in History of the Game: Doubleday to the Present Day, http://mlb.mlb.com/mlb/history/mlb_ history_people.jsp?story=com_bio_1 (Major League Baseball, accessed 10 October 2009).

The sport of courts: baseball and the law

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