Of course the league will quote the league by-laws which only indicate a majority vote is required to relocate a franchise but the constitution likely super cedes the bylaws.

I’d like to vote answer “C: Both A and B.”

It shouldn’t be that hard to get an answer to the simple question of “can Toronto veto another team in their territory or not?”

Is a club’s territory automatically increased if the city corporate limits are increased by, say, amalgamation? What were the city corporate limits when the Toronto franchise was awarded? Is there a process for re-establishing, for the purposes of the constitution, city corporate limits? And finally, will Sundin play this year?

The answers may be all there in the fine print – I’m too lazy to check.

Toronto has to provide written consent for any new franchise to be located within a 50 mile radius of the Toronto corporate limits. That seems to be the plain meaning of “territory” here.

It means that the Islanders couldn’t move to Brooklyn and excludes Hamilton as well, subject to wrangling over the actual corporate limits.

“No franchise shall be GRANTED for a territory”

When you are relocating an existing franchise, you are not “granting” a franchise. The granting of a franchise occurs at one time and one time only – at the beginning (or, in other words, the expansion process).

Relocation is dealt with elsewhere in the document – specifically in the by-laws. The by-laws (which are themselves also part of the constitution as per Article 10) regulate the process by which teams may relocate (including relocating to the home territory of others).

If you are posting the constitution, James, you need to post the by-laws as well. It is black letter law that a contractual document is to be read and construed in its entirety.

As a further aside, it is also black letter law that documents are to be read in whatever manner is necessary to allow meaning to be given to all of the provisions thereof (in other words, if there is an interpretation of a clause which would make another clause nonsensical, then that interpretation must give way to an interpretation which allows all of the provisions to make sense together – common sense, right?). The manner in which this is done for the NHL Constitution and By-laws is to have the last sentence of section 4.3 refer to expansion and the by-laws refer to relocation.

In any event, though, one does not have to refer to the above canons of interpretation. The granting of franchises clearly means the expansion process and does not refer to the relocation of already-granted franchises. I actually made this point on some board or other some time ago when the constitution first came into the public domain, if memory serves.

In addition, the NHL has a saving clause in the by-laws (the # escapes me) which provides that, if any particular Board approval requirements regarding franchise placement are contrary to the law, then it is a simple majority vote. The NHL’s position is that this clause has effectively overridden clause 4.3. Contractual interpretation rules permit that to be the case.

As an aside, I am really tired with this ongoing meme of “the NHL doesn’t follow its own rules”. In reading a lot of the court-filed correspondence, I am struck by how formally the NHL seems to structure its affairs. It is not all that surprising, since it is run by ex-lawyers, but even in what would normally be less formal “deal” correspondence, they are quite attuned to the rules of the constitution and by-laws. There is little to none of the “oh, those are just fomalities” kind of written correspondence that other businessmen often employ. They are actually pretty anal about it, as far as I have read.

… yeah. This shouldn’t be news, right? Weren’t the both of them going on about Phoenix was fine financially, how everything in the league is rosy, etc?

If we know anything about the current Commissioner and his Deputy, we know that they will say whatever they think paints the rosiest picture of things, regardless of whether it’s even remotely plausible or not.