On April 4, 2019, the Supreme Court of New Jersey denied Josh Finkelman’s certification and seemingly his last attempt at legal recourse. As we have previously reported, Finkelman filed a proposed class action suit against the NFL for an alleged violation of a New Jersey’s Consumer Fraud Act, which Finkelman claimed prevented event holders from withholding more than 5 percent of all tickets to a given event from “sale to the general public.”
In 2014, Finkelman purchased two tickets to Super Bowl XLVIII for $4,000. According to Finkelman, the only tickets to Super Bowl XLVIII, released for sale to the general public, were roughly 1 percent of all available Super Bowl tickets sold through the NFL’s ticket lottery. This, according to Finkelman, dramatically drove the price of tickets up. Similarly, a second plaintiff, Ben Hoch-Parker, alleged that he could not purchase a ticket to Super Bowl XLVIII because the cheapest seat he could find was $4,200. Finkelman’s suit argued that the New Jersey should have forced the NFL to make 95 percent of Super Bowl tickets available through the lottery.
Back in January 2019, the New Jersey Supreme Court concluded that Finkelman had misunderstood the New Jersey Consumer Fraud Act. The Act’s 95 percent rule only applied to the 1 percent of tickets the NFL had already decided to make public via the lottery, not 95 percent of all available tickets. Previously, the suit, filed in 2014, made its way through the Third Circuit, but most recently, Finkelman moved for reconsideration; however, the court rejected Finkelman’s motion and upheld its January 2019 ruling.