Ray Rice just joined the unemployment line, but not for what he did or didn’t do on the field as a member of the Baltimore Ravens. The star NFL running back broke the law, and then embarrassed the league and his team, which fired him months after the event became known. The league’s handling of the Rice controversy has its parallels to the current trend in universities and colleges of replacing or supplementing the court system to provide a form of popular justice – and both show the need to step back and reconsider. 

Let’s start at the beginning. Rice got...