When the NBA's race relations problem broke anew Sunday the Reverend Al Sharpton said that the "vetting" of NBA owners should continue. I didn't know that any "vetting," which I understood to mean some kind of investigation, had been initiated. I thought whatever it was had begun and ended with the Donald Sterling nee Tokowitz case. I still do not know if any after-the-fact vetting or investigation occurred. However, what William C. Rhoden of The New York Times wrote on Sunday made me think it had not:

Now I understand why the N.B.A. did not want the Donald Sterling case to go to trial. Why the league did not want to follow the truth to where it really led.

Now it should.

In light of this second embarrassing disclosure, N.B.A. Commissioner Adam Silver should conduct an investigation to find out how many other Donald Sterlings and Bruce Levensons are among the league’s owners and top executives. Who are the racists, the sexists, the homophobes? Throughout the Sterling ordeal, I maintained that the best thing that could have happened to the N.B.A. — to all of us — was for the case to go to trial. To push Sterling — who was forced to sell the Los Angeles Clippers several months after an audio recording in which he was heard making racist comments was released in April, — to acknowledge what he knew about the deeds and misdeeds of other owners and top executives in the league.

I do remember Sterling hinting that he had dope on other owners and threatening to reveal it. I agree with Sharpton and Rhoden that the NBA should follow up. I share Rhoden's assumption that Sterling and Levenson are not the only two. I think Sterling should be talked to, if he will talk. I disagree with Rhoden that the NBA should have let the Sterling case go to trial. It was in everyone's interests to divest Sterling as soon as possible. Players were, justifiably, threatening to boycott the upcoming season, not only "Clippers" players but others as well. 

If the NBA is to proactively--and retroactively--investigate its owners the issue for me, a lawyer, is by what standard. The NBA may, I do not know, have the legal right to just do a blanket search of the emails of all owners and team employees. In my opinion it should not do that. That is too close for me to a witch hunt. There is, in the penumbras and emanations of Anglo-American law, the notion that we should be free from witch hunts, that without some reason to suspect, we should be free from suspicion. When the larger issue is race relations and here Jewish-Black relations, the NBA should be chary of blanket suspicion. Jews and Blacks have been abused by racial profiling assumptions. No blanket searches. Searches based upon some standard. There is a smorgasbord of standards from which to choose. How about "reasonable and articulable suspicion"?