Petitioner Rachel plays in a league with her fiancé, run by the man who will officiate their wedding later this year. In the weeks before the season, the league remade its scoring system by group-chat plebiscite: roughly ten polls, each with three or four options, all posted within an hour or two. One measure that emerged awards a tenth of a point per punt and kick return yard, making a return yard worth exactly as much as a rushing yard. The Commissioner never entered that rule into the league’s platform settings.
Week 1 paired Petitioner against the Commissioner. He started Rashid Shaheed, who caught one pass for four yards and, under the settings as they stood, earned less than half a point. Shaheed also returned kicks for eighty yards. After the week’s games had ended, the Commissioner noticed that his own player had not been credited for those yards, opened the league settings, and activated the kick return rule. Shaheed’s line grew by roughly eight points. Petitioner asks whether the rule may be applied to Week 1 under these circumstances.
We hold that it may be applied to Week 1 for every team in the league except the Commissioner’s. The rule was the league’s; the failure to implement it was his. He may correct the settings for Week 2 and beyond, and he must correct the Week 1 scores of the managers who did nothing wrong. But he may not, after the games are over and with his own matchup on the line, reach into the settings and award himself eight points he forgot to make available to everyone. Whether those eight points decided the matchup we do not know; Justice Kelly inquired, and the answer had not arrived by argument. It does not matter. The defect is one of process, not of margin, and a process that is impermissible when it wins the game is equally impermissible when it merely pads the score.
I
Our starting point is settled. A league’s platform settings are its operative rules, and a matchup played under those settings may not be rescored after the fact. Parker v. League, 21-1242-2 (2021). The Commissioner’s response is that Parker concerned intentional settings, and that this Court permits retroactive correction of accidental ones even where the correction happens to help the Commissioner. See In re Dynasty League Fumble Scoring, 21-1270-2 (2021).
That reads Fumble Scoring for more than it holds. The case turned on timing. Five league members, the Commissioner among them, agreed on a Sunday that a double-counted fumble penalty should be fixed. Only on Monday night did Lamar Jackson fumble his way into making the correction dispositive. We permitted retroactive application because the agreement was reached before anyone knew whom it would help; the Commissioner’s interest, we said, had not yet materialized. That is the whole of the exception. The principle is familiar: terms struck behind a veil of ignorance are presumptively fair, and terms struck after the veil lifts are not. See In re Blind Swap of the Third and Fourth Overall Rookie Picks, 26-1478-1 (2026).
Here the veil was not merely lifted; it was the reason the Commissioner looked. He did not notice a scoring error and then learn it favored him. He noticed his own player was short and then found the error. The correction was made by the one person with the power to make it, in the one matchup where it benefited him, at the one moment when its effect was fully known. That is not Fumble Scoring. It is Josh v. Commissioner, 22-1135-1 (2022), where a commissioner rewrote the veto threshold mid-review to void a trade his wife regretted, and we held that a commissioner whose interest has materialized must abstain or put the matter to the league. He may not adjudicate it himself. No one may judge his own cause. Cf. Tumey v. Ohio, 273 U.S. 510 (1927) (holding that a judge with a direct financial interest in convicting the defendant before him could not constitutionally preside).
There is a second, simpler ground. Entering the settings is the Commissioner’s job, and he did not do it. As the Chief Justice put it at argument, “you forgot. It’s on you.” A party solely responsible for a ministerial task, who alone fails to perform it, bears the loss from its non-performance. He does not get to shift that loss to whichever opponent drew him in Week 1.
II
The remedy requires more care, because the Commissioner is not the only person his mistake touched. Somewhere in this league, another manager who started a capable returner probably lost points, and perhaps a game, that the league’s own rule would have given him. Denying retroactive application across the board would, as Fumble Scoring observed, punish the entire league for one man’s failure. Granting it across the board would let the Commissioner keep his eight points. Neither is acceptable.
So we do neither. The kick return rule shall be applied to Week 1 for every team other than the Commissioner’s, by manual adjustment if the platform requires it, and to every team, his included, from Week 2 forward. The Commissioner’s Week 1 total stands as the settings scored it when the games ended: one catch, four yards, nothing for the returns. He loses the points for that week alone.
This is the fiduciary’s forfeiture, adapted. When a trustee profits from a conflicted transaction, the law does not unwind the trust; it makes the trustee disgorge the profit while the beneficiaries keep their bargain. We have applied that logic to commissioners before. See Denmark Team Owner v. Commissioner, 25-0717-2 (2025) (holding that a Commissioner may not profit from his own wrongdoing and permitting retroactive scoring adjustments to remedy the harm). The league bargained for kick return yards for everyone, and it gets them. The Commissioner gets the same, less the one week he spent as the beneficiary of his own oversight. A commissioner who wanted to keep his league’s respect would have done this unprompted; Justice Horlbeck called it the act of a benevolent dictator. Our order makes the benevolence mandatory.
III
Petitioner does not challenge the kick return rule’s adoption, so we assume without deciding that ten rapid-fire polls can constitute league legislation. We note our unease. A rule that emerges from a survey blizzard and was absent from the settings when managers drafted is a rule nobody could have planned around. Managers draft from the settings, and so do auto-draft lists; if the settings said return yards were worth nothing, then on draft day they were worth nothing, whatever the group chat concluded. The settings are the statute; the polls are legislative history, and this Court’s enthusiasm for legislative history is limited. The thinner the adoption process, the less patience we will have for a commissioner who invokes it after the fact. The Chief Justice writes separately on the larger governance question.
* * *
One matter remains that lies outside our jurisdiction but not, apparently, outside the parties’ concerns. Petitioner’s wedding officiant has shown himself capable of forgetting a rule for weeks and remembering it the moment it favored him. Whether that record recommends him for a role requiring a prepared speech and a license valid in the correct state is for Petitioner and her fiancé. We observe only that the Justices were unanimous: if the Commissioner accepts today’s judgment with grace, he may be trusted with the wedding. Justice Kelly framed the choice as kick return yards or the officiant’s chair. We have relieved him of the first for one week so that he may keep the second.
Relief granted in part. Kick return scoring shall be applied to Week 1 for all teams other than the Commissioner’s, and to all teams thereafter.
Chief Justice Heifetz, concurring.
I join the Court’s opinion in full. I write separately about the ten polls.
Two years ago, in Andrew v. Commissioner, 24-0826-1 (2024), I wrote for the Court that fantasy leagues are not autocracies and commissioners are not dictators. I meant it, and today’s decision is the proof: a commissioner who used his settings access to help himself has been told that he cannot. But Andrew condemned a commissioner who exercised power for his own benefit. It did not endorse the alternative on display in this record, which is a league that legislates by survey.
Consider what that process produced. Ten polls in an hour or two. Three or four options each. A rule valuing a return yard at par with a rushing yard, which Justice Kelly rightly calls not ideal, adopted by whoever happened to be looking at his phone. Then nobody implemented it, and nobody noticed, until the one person who could flip the switch had a reason to. That is not tyranny. It is the opposite failure. A commissioner in a well-run league sets the rules, publishes them in one place, enters them in the settings, and answers for them. He is accountable precisely because he alone acted. What this league has instead is diffusion: a rule everyone voted on, no one owns, and no one could rely upon.
Every league I have watched govern this way has arrived at the same place. As I said at argument, we tried democracy. It had a good run. The Commissioner should carry out today’s remedy as the benevolent dictator Justice Horlbeck describes. Next year he might also skip the polls.