New Jersey is asking the U.S. Supreme Court to take up the fight over sports-event contracts.
The state is asking the Supreme Court to weigh in on whether sports-event contracts should be regulated at the state or federal level. The request came Wednesday, in a petition for writ of certiorari from New Jersey Division of Gaming Enforcement interim director Mary Jo Flaherty and New Jersey attorney general Jennifer Davenport. The petition was filed one day before New Jersey’s deadline to make the request.
“Kalshi bills itself as ‘the first app for legal sports betting in all 50 states’ and believes it can offer that ‘legal sports betting’ without following the sports-gambling laws of any of those 50 States,” the petition says. “Kalshi and the other so-called ‘prediction markets’ have built an entire business model on the claim that Congress silently displaced the States’ authority over sports wagering 16 years ago when it directed the Commodity Futures Trading Commission to regulate swaps in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis.”
New Jersey’s petition comes less than a week after a three-judge panel for the Ninth Circuit, a federal appeals court, unanimously ruled that Nevada can enforce its gambling laws against Kalshi. That decision created what’s known as a “circuit split,” which is when two appeals courts rule differently on the same issue. In April, the Third Circuit ruled New Jersey’s gaming regulator could not stop Kalshi from offering sports-event contracts in the state.
