Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act of 1992

Based on Wikipedia: Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act of 1992

The Law That Accidentally Created a $300 Billion Industry

Here's an irony worth savoring: a law designed to protect Americans from sports gambling ultimately unleashed the largest legal betting boom in the nation's history. In the six years since its demise, regulated sportsbooks have collected over $300 billion in wagers, with state and local governments pocketing more than $2 billion in tax revenue.

The law in question was the Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act of 1992, known by the acronym PASPA or sometimes called the Bradley Act. For a quarter century, it stood as a federal prohibition against sports betting in most of the United States. Then, in May 2018, the Supreme Court struck it down in a landmark decision that reshaped American gambling forever.

But to understand why PASPA fell—and why its collapse was perhaps inevitable—we need to go back to how this peculiar law came into being in the first place.

The Strange Geography of American Gambling

Gambling regulation in the United States has always been a patchwork affair. Unlike countries with unified national gambling laws, America has traditionally left these decisions to individual states. Nevada built an entire economy around casino gambling. New Jersey transformed Atlantic City into an East Coast gambling destination. Meanwhile, states like Utah banned all forms of gambling entirely.

This patchwork approach stems from the structure of the American Constitution itself. The Tenth Amendment—the last item in the Bill of Rights—explicitly states that any powers not granted to the federal government are reserved for the states or the people. Gambling regulation appears nowhere in the Constitution, which is why it has historically been a state-by-state matter.

By the early 1990s, this created an uncomfortable situation for sports leagues. Nevada had long offered legal sports betting at licensed establishments called sportsbooks. Oregon, Delaware, and Montana ran state lottery games that incorporated sports predictions. These arrangements predated any federal intervention and operated under established regulatory frameworks.

But the leagues saw a threat on the horizon. More states might follow Nevada's model. Sports betting could spread nationwide. And with it, they feared, would come the specter of corruption.

When the NBA Commissioner Came to Washington

On June 26, 1991, David Stern walked into a Senate hearing room. Stern was then the commissioner of the National Basketball Association, a position he would hold for three decades while transforming the league into a global entertainment powerhouse. But on this day, he came to Washington with a warning.

The Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Patents, Copyrights and Trademarks—an unusual venue for gambling discussions—was holding hearings on sports betting. Stern's testimony was blunt: the interstate ramifications of sports gambling demanded federal action.

The subcommittee agreed. Their findings declared that sports gambling was a national problem whose harms extended beyond the borders of states that permitted it. Congress, they determined, should use its authority under the Commerce Clause to act.

The Commerce Clause is a provision in the Constitution giving Congress power to regulate commerce among the states. It has been used to justify an enormous range of federal laws, from civil rights legislation to environmental regulations. Now it would be wielded against sports betting.

Bill Bradley's Unusual Legacy

The resulting legislation carries the name of one of its primary sponsors: New Jersey Senator Bill Bradley. This is worth pausing over, because Bradley's biography makes him an unusual champion for anti-gambling legislation.

Before entering politics, Bradley was a professional basketball player. Not just any player—he was a Princeton All-American, a Rhodes Scholar, and a two-time NBA champion with the New York Knicks. He understood professional sports from the inside. He had competed in games where, unbeknownst to the public, millions of dollars might have been wagered on the outcome.

Bradley's concern was the integrity of the games themselves. If sports betting expanded, would players face increased pressure from gamblers? Would referees become targets for corruption? Would fans begin to suspect that the outcomes they watched were influenced by betting interests rather than athletic competition?

These weren't hypothetical concerns. Professional sports had weathered gambling scandals before. The 1919 Black Sox scandal, in which members of the Chicago White Sox deliberately lost the World Series in exchange for payments from gamblers, remained a cautionary tale decades later. College basketball had been rocked by point-shaving scandals in which players deliberately manipulated scores to benefit gamblers. Pete Rose, one of baseball's greatest players, had been banned from the sport for betting on games.

The Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act passed in 1992 and took effect on January 1, 1993. It was codified—meaning officially recorded in federal law—at Title 28 of the United States Code, Section 3701.

The Grandfather Clause and New Jersey's Missed Opportunity

PASPA didn't simply ban all sports betting everywhere. The law contained crucial exceptions that would later prove central to its undoing.

States that already had legal sports betting could keep it. This meant Nevada's sportsbooks stayed open. Oregon, Delaware, and Montana could continue their sports lotteries. These existing operations were grandfathered in—a term meaning they were exempted because they predated the new rules.

But Congress also created something more unusual: a one-year window of opportunity. Any state that had operated licensed casino gambling for the previous decade could pass a law allowing sports wagering within twelve months of PASPA taking effect. The deadline was January 1, 1994.

This exception was specifically crafted with New Jersey in mind. Atlantic City had been home to legal casinos since 1978, giving New Jersey the required ten-year track record. Congress was essentially offering the state a path to join Nevada in the sports betting business.

New Jersey didn't take it.

Why? The political dynamics of the early 1990s made sports betting expansion a difficult sell. Atlantic City's casinos were still fighting for legitimacy. Adding sports betting might have complicated that effort. The major sports leagues opposed it vocally. And perhaps most importantly, no one fully appreciated what the sports betting market would eventually become.

This missed deadline would haunt New Jersey for the next two decades.

What PASPA Actually Prohibited

Understanding PASPA requires grasping what it did and didn't do. The law didn't make it illegal for individuals to place sports bets—that would have been a matter for state criminal law. Instead, PASPA prohibited states from authorizing, licensing, or operating sports betting.

This distinction matters enormously. PASPA didn't criminalize gambling directly. It told states that they couldn't legalize sports betting. The federal government was, in effect, commanding states not to change their own laws.

The law also carved out exceptions for activities that weren't quite sports betting as traditionally understood. Parimutuel wagering—the system used for horse racing and dog racing, where bettors compete against each other rather than against a bookmaker—remained legal. So did jai alai, a fast-paced court sport popular in Florida where spectators traditionally bet on the outcome.

These exceptions reflected the political realities of the time. Horse racing had powerful lobbying interests. Jai alai was a regional concern with its own constituency. The major professional sports leagues didn't particularly care about these activities, so they weren't included in the ban.

The Constitutional Time Bomb

From the moment PASPA was enacted, some legal scholars raised a troubling question: could the federal government actually do this?

The Tenth Amendment, remember, reserves to the states all powers not explicitly granted to the federal government. And there's a related constitutional principle called anti-commandeering. The federal government cannot commandeer—that is, force into service—state governments to enforce federal policies.

The Supreme Court had established this principle clearly in cases like Printz v. United States, which struck down parts of a federal gun control law that required local law enforcement to conduct background checks. The federal government could regulate guns directly if it chose, but it couldn't force state officials to do the regulating.

PASPA seemed to do something similar, but in reverse. It didn't require states to enforce a federal gambling prohibition. Instead, it prohibited states from repealing their own gambling bans. The federal government was telling states they couldn't change their own laws.

Was that constitutional? The question would take more than two decades to answer.

New Jersey's Long Campaign

New Jersey never stopped regretting its missed opportunity. As the years passed and the potential of sports betting became clearer, state officials grew increasingly frustrated with their exclusion from a market Nevada had all to itself.

In March 2009, State Senator Raymond Lesniak filed the first major legal challenge to PASPA. He argued that the law unconstitutionally discriminated among states by allowing four states to offer sports betting while prohibiting the other forty-six from doing so. This was, he contended, a violation of equal protection principles.

The case was dismissed on a technicality—the court ruled that only the governor could bring such a suit, and Governor Chris Christie at the time believed challenging PASPA would be difficult.

But public opinion in New Jersey was shifting rapidly. In 2010, voters overwhelmingly supported a referendum to legalize sports gambling. The next year, they approved a state constitutional amendment permitting it. And in 2012, the state legislature passed the Sports Wagering Act, which would allow sports betting at casinos and racetracks.

The sports leagues responded immediately. The National Collegiate Athletic Association (commonly known as the NCAA, the governing body for college sports), the National Basketball Association, the National Football League, the National Hockey League, and Major League Baseball filed suit together. They argued that New Jersey's new law violated PASPA.

New Jersey's legal strategy was clever. State officials acknowledged that their new law probably did violate PASPA. That was precisely the point. They wanted to challenge PASPA itself as unconstitutional under the Tenth Amendment's anti-commandeering doctrine.

The Courts Side With the Leagues—With a Caveat

The United States District Court for the District of New Jersey ruled against the state, finding that PASPA was constitutional and that New Jersey's sports betting law therefore couldn't stand. The state appealed.

On September 17, 2013, the Third Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed the lower court's decision. Judge Julio M. Fuentes wrote the opinion holding that New Jersey's law violated PASPA and couldn't take effect.

But the appeals court included a curious observation. PASPA, the judges noted, didn't prevent New Jersey from repealing its existing gambling prohibitions. The law stopped states from authorizing sports betting. But could a state simply remove the laws that made betting illegal, without actively authorizing it?

This was a fine legal distinction—the difference between actively legalizing something and passively declining to prohibit it. New Jersey saw an opening.

The Partial Repeal Strategy

Governor Christie, who had initially been skeptical of challenging PASPA, now threw his support behind a new approach. In 2014, New Jersey passed a law that didn't authorize sports betting—it simply repealed existing state prohibitions on betting at casinos and racetracks.

The sports leagues and the NCAA sued again, arguing this was just a clever workaround that still violated PASPA. And once again, they prevailed. The District Court ruled against New Jersey. The Third Circuit, sitting en banc (meaning all the judges on the court heard the case together, rather than the usual three-judge panel), agreed.

By August 2016, New Jersey had lost at every level. Only one option remained: the Supreme Court of the United States.

The Supreme Court Takes the Case

Asking the Supreme Court to hear your case is a long shot. The Court receives thousands of petitions each year and accepts only about seventy or eighty. The justices are looking for cases that present important constitutional questions or resolve disagreements among lower courts.

New Jersey argued that PASPA presented exactly such a question. Did the Constitution permit the federal government to prohibit states from changing their own laws? This was an anti-commandeering issue with implications far beyond gambling.

In June 2017, the Supreme Court agreed to hear the case.

By the time oral arguments took place in December 2017, New Jersey had a new governor. Chris Christie's term had ended, and Phil Murphy had taken office. The case was therefore restyled as Murphy v. National Collegiate Athletic Association. It was consolidated with a separate petition called NJ Thoroughbred Horsemen v. NCAA, representing the commercial interests of New Jersey's horse racing industry.

The Decision That Changed Everything

On May 14, 2018, the Supreme Court announced its decision. PASPA was unconstitutional.

The Court ruled 7-2 that the core provisions of PASPA violated the anti-commandeering principle. The federal government simply couldn't tell states they weren't allowed to legalize sports betting. Congress could regulate gambling directly if it chose—it could even ban sports betting outright as a matter of federal law—but it couldn't force states to maintain their own prohibitions.

A separate 6-3 majority concluded that the entire law was inseparable. If the main prohibition fell, the whole statute fell with it.

Justice Samuel Alito wrote the majority opinion. The Constitution, he explained, gives Congress considerable power over interstate commerce. But that power doesn't include commanding state legislatures to enact or maintain particular laws. PASPA crossed that line.

The decision was immediately celebrated by gambling interests and state treasurers eyeing new revenue sources. It was mourned by sports leagues that had fought for a quarter century to maintain the prohibition—though many of those same leagues would soon pivot to embracing legal betting as a business opportunity.

The Flood Gates Open

New Jersey moved first. Within weeks of the Supreme Court's decision, the state's casinos and racetracks began taking legal sports bets. The state that had fought longest for this right wasn't going to waste any time exercising it.

Other states followed rapidly. By the end of 2018, several states had launched legal sports betting. By 2024, more than thirty states had legalized it in some form, with more considering legislation.

The market exceeded all expectations. In less than six years, Americans wagered over $300 billion through legal sportsbooks. State and local governments collected more than $2 billion in tax revenue—money that had previously flowed to illegal bookmakers or offshore gambling sites that paid nothing to American treasuries.

The sports leagues themselves underwent a remarkable transformation. Organizations that had spent decades fighting sports betting now embraced it. They negotiated partnerships with betting companies. They sold data to bookmakers. They incorporated betting information into broadcasts. The NFL, which had once been the most vociferous opponent of legalized gambling, began running gambling-focused advertisements during games.

What Bill Bradley Got Wrong—And Right

Looking back at PASPA from the vantage point of its aftermath, what can we learn?

Bill Bradley and the other sponsors of the law were right that sports betting would explode if given legal sanction. The market has proven far larger than even optimistic predictions suggested. Americans clearly have an enormous appetite for wagering on games.

They were also right that integrity concerns are real. Since legalization, there have been scandals involving athletes who gambled on their own sports. The ease of mobile betting—something no one anticipated in 1992—has created new risks that regulators are still learning to address.

But the law's sponsors were wrong about one crucial thing. They assumed that prohibition would actually prevent sports betting. It didn't. Americans wagered hundreds of billions of dollars on sports throughout PASPA's existence—they just did it illegally, through bookies, offshore websites, and informal arrangements that offered none of the consumer protections or tax revenue of regulated markets.

PASPA didn't stop sports betting. It just pushed it underground, where it was harder to monitor and impossible to tax.

The Tenth Amendment's Quiet Power

The Murphy decision stands as one of the most significant Tenth Amendment rulings in decades. It reaffirmed that the federal government cannot commandeer state legislative processes—a principle with implications far beyond gambling.

Consider what PASPA's survival would have meant. The federal government could have used the same approach in other areas. It could have prohibited states from legalizing marijuana, for instance, not by making marijuana federally illegal (which it already is) but by commanding states to keep their own prohibitions in place. It could have prevented states from adopting various policies the federal government disfavored without actually having to pass substantive federal legislation.

The Supreme Court closed that door. If the federal government wants to prohibit something, it must do so directly, taking political responsibility for the prohibition. It cannot hide behind state laws while preventing states from changing them.

This is a protection for state autonomy that benefits both progressive and conservative causes, depending on the issue. It's part of the ongoing American negotiation between federal power and state independence—a negotiation that has been underway since the Constitution was ratified in 1788 and shows no signs of ending.

The Future of American Gambling

PASPA's demise accelerated trends that were already in motion. Online gambling has expanded rapidly. Fantasy sports, once a gray area, have become mainstream. States are experimenting with different regulatory approaches, from full commercialization to state-run monopolies.

The patchwork nature of American gambling law continues. You can place a legal sports bet in New Jersey but not in neighboring New York City (though New York State later legalized mobile betting). You can gamble on your phone in Pennsylvania but face restrictions in nearby Ohio. Each state is its own laboratory, trying different approaches and learning from the results.

Whether this is good for Americans depends on your perspective. Gambling addiction is real, and the ease of mobile betting has created new risks. But so is the freedom to make your own choices about how to spend your money. PASPA tried to make that choice for Americans at the federal level. The Supreme Court said that's not the federal government's call to make.

The states will decide. Some will embrace gambling. Some will restrict it. Some will find middle grounds. That's American federalism at work—messy, inconsistent, and ultimately democratic.

Bill Bradley's law lasted a quarter century before falling to a constitutional challenge that some had predicted from the start. Whether its goals were worthy, its methods were ultimately flawed. And in its failure, it opened a market that has already transformed American sports—and shows no signs of slowing down.