America’s gambling landscape had long been a patchwork, but sports betting was tightly regulated throughout most of the twentieth century, and the major sports leagues were scrupulously united in opposition to gambling, which they rightly viewed as a major threat to the integrity of their games. But the public was more ambivalent, and as states sought new sources of revenue, Congress decided to act.
The most significant anti-sports gambling law was the Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act of 1992, abbreviated as PASPA (and sometimes called the Bradley Act for one of its sponsors, Bill Bradley, a U.S. senator and former professional basketball player). The law—which garnered 62 co-sponsors in the Senate and passed both houses overwhelmingly—was in fact a bit of a Frankenstein’s monster. It did not technically outlaw sports gambling nationally, although that was broadly its purpose, but rather prevented state, local, and tribal governments from legalizing it. It contained robust carve-outs for Nevada (of course) and also for existing sports lotteries in Delaware, Montana, and Oregon. It exempted pari-mutuel horse and dog race betting and, for some reason, jai alai. It gave New Jersey—in a gift to Atlantic City—a year to come up with its own legalized sports betting regime. But, as writer and researcher Jonathan D. Cohen observes dryly in Losing Big: America’s Reckless Bet on Sports Gambling, “New Jersey, being New Jersey, failed to do so.”
This failure was in some sense the great precipitating event of the broad legalization of sports gambling in the United States. After two failed attempts to overturn PASPA, Chris Christie, then the Republican governor of New Jersey, in 2014 signed a state law legalizing sports gambling in New Jersey in contravention of PASPA. The four major professional sports leagues and the NCAA brought suit; that suit eventually became Christie v. NCAA; by the time it was decided by the Supreme Court in 2018, Christie had been term-limited out of office, and it was renamed Murphy v. NCAA, after the state’s new Democratic governor, Phil Murphy. The Supreme Court overturned PASPA in May of that year, with Samuel Alito writing the majority opinion, concluding that PASPA illegally “commandeered” the authority of state legislatures and violated the states’ rights that we always hear about when some part of America wants to do something terrible. The floodgates opened. As of December 1, 2025, with the legalization of sports gambling in Missouri, a total of 39 states, Washington, D.C., and Puerto Rico had legalized some form of betting on sports.