It might be hard to imagine that a law that sat on the federal rolls for more than a quarter century might be suddenly stricken down for constitutional violations, but these things do happen.
Historical examples of this happening are sparse, with the most prominent being Shelby County v. Holder, the 2013 case that resulted in some key components of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 being excised from the law. However, after Monday, May 14, 2018, the Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act of 1992 (PASPA) can join that list. This law, which for roughly 25 years banned all or most forms of sports betting outside of the Las Vegas Strip, was declared unconstitutional by a 6-3 majority decision of the US Supreme Court on the basis of several violations of the 10th amendment of the nation’s founding document.
However, even though many sports gambling enthusiasts all over the nation, as well as legislators, gaming operators and even casual sports fans have been clamoring for years for the law to be laid to rest, that does not necessarily mean that it was always going to be so. No, PASPA’s time had come not because the public demanded it, but rather because it was and had always been running contrary to the tenants of the US Constitution that guarantee that powers not specifically reserved to the federal government or specifically stripped from the states were the province of the states. Therefore, PASPA was, as the heart of the matter, a question of the rights of the states to decide what kind of laws they want to pass.
Nevertheless, the ways in which PASPA was unconstitutional may not be readily apparent, and so it’s our goal to break down a few of the main points raised by the SCOTUS members as they deliberated and eventually reached a convincing majority decision to bin the longstanding ban on almost all sports betting activity in the country.
Primarily, PASPA violates what is known as the “anticommandeering rule” contained in the 10th Amendment, the last one in the Bill of Rights. That because PASPA does not either establish nor appeal to any higher federal sports betting regulatory law, but rather disallows the nation’s constituent states from passing laws of their own to authorize or regulate sports betting as they see fit – a flagrant violation of the 10th Amendment. Furthermore, PASPA contains a provision that prohibits the states from licensing “sports gambling schemes” in yet another violation of the constitutional rule against commandeering (that is, controlling the actions of a state government so as to enforce federal law).
To that point, Justice Samuel Alito wrote in his delivery of the majority decision that “the PASPA provision at issue… prohibiting state authorization of sports gambling – violates the anticommandeering rule.” Alito said that particular provision of the anti-sports betting law “unequivocally dictates” what actions and state legislature can and cannot do and is therefore constitutes a direct violation of the doctrine of States’ Rights. At any rate, the highest court in the land wasn’t having any of it, and struck down the law to the applause of legal New Jersey gambling bettors and gaming operators around the country – and indeed around the world as well.