"As a result of those tremendous victories, you’ll see tribes take a much more active role in offering statewide mobile sports wagering,” said Arizona-based tribal attorney Scott Crowell.
With new federal regulations and assistance from the U.S. Supreme Court, Indian gaming is positioned for online-gaming expansion and greater sovereignty.
The U.S. Supreme Court’s refusal in June to take up a case that challenged the Seminole Tribe of Florida’s exclusive rights to online sports betting in the state continues to be celebrated by tribes across the country. By not acting, the Supreme Court upheld a 2023 D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals decision that paved the way for tribal online sports betting and igaming off of Indian land.
Earlier this year, the U.S. Department of Interior updated federal regulations regarding Class III gaming compacts that look away from some of the heavy-handedness of states in negotiating compacts with tribes and better protect tribal sovereignty.
Those new rules piggyback on the D.C. Circuit’s decision that enables tribes to strike deals with states and offer online gaming to customers off the reservation, as long as the computer servers sit on tribal lands. The new regulations mirror the Department of Interior’s 2021 approval of a compact between the Seminole Tribe and Florida.
The Florida development was unsuccessfully challenged in the courts by commercial operators that complained the tribe was given a statewide monopoly and that the compact violated the Indian Gaming Regulatory Act adopted by Congress in 1988, because the gambling wasn’t occurring on tribal lands.
"As a result of those tremendous victories, you’ll see tribes take a much more active role in offering statewide mobile sports wagering,” said Arizona-based tribal attorney Scott Crowell. "You have to look at it on a state-by-state basis to see how much opportunity was created by the new regs and the order out of the Supreme Court. What we do know is if they’d gone the other way, it would have been devastating for tribes.”
The new DOI regulations enacted in March provide "a clear road map in which states and tribes can structure statewide mobile sports wagering such that it will be lawful under IGRA and federal law and approved by the Department,” Crowell said. "In many respects, it was the codification of the position they took in approving the Florida-Seminole compact. The decision was a validation of the legitimacy and appropriateness of those regulations.”
Under IGRA, sports betting is classified as Class III gaming, so it requires amendments to compacts for tribes to engage in it unless previously authorized. Tribes in Michigan, for example, entered sports betting under state laws authorizing sports betting and online gaming that also enabled commercial operators.
https://cdcgaming.com/tribal-gaming-well-positioned-after-new-regulations-and-supreme-court-ruling/