Oliver Bateman Does the Work

Oliver Bateman Does the Work

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Oliver Bateman Does the Work
Oliver Bateman Does the Work
The Work of Regulating Sports Betting

The Work of Regulating Sports Betting

It can't and won't be done, but isn't it nice to imagine that it could?

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Oliver Bateman Does the Work
Mar 28, 2025
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Oliver Bateman Does the Work
Oliver Bateman Does the Work
The Work of Regulating Sports Betting
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Do the work of gambling your life away

This long paper was originally destined for life in print. Now it’s here — “this just isn’t doing it for us”1 — but it’s good enough, and relevant enough to my prior work here, that I wanted to share it with you.


Growing economic unease surrounds the America we have inherited in the years since the Supreme Court’s decision in Murphy v. National Collegiate Athletic Association, 584 U.S. 453 (2018). Since then, my frequent writing on sports betting has tried to warn of the unprecedented pace at which gambling has become normalized. In one of those articles, I argued that sports betting is “worse than Oxycontin,” a phrase meant to convey how ubiquitous and destructive these newly unregulated forms of online gambling have become. Although that comparison may strike some as hyperbolic, the evidence of increasingly perilous addiction, financial ruin, and regulatory capture mounts every day.

The Court in Murphy invalidated the Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act (PASPA), a relatively modest federal law enacted in 1992. PASPA barred most states from legalizing sports betting, premised on the longstanding conviction — shared at one time by sports leagues, public health experts, and a bipartisan array of legislators — that widespread wagering, especially on professional and amateur competitions, threatens the integrity of sports and poses serious social harms. For a generation, PASPA effectively curtailed the expansion of legalized betting beyond Nevada (grandfathered under the law), although it did not stamp out illicit offshore operations. By tossing out PASPA, however, Murphy left the United States with no uniform standards or coherent restrictions.

In the period since, states have rushed headlong into the gaming business, creating a patchwork of regulatory regimes that has primarily served gambling operators eager to expand their offerings. With minimal oversight and an abundance of alluring, high-tech mobile platforms, sports betting has, in a handful of years, transformed from a marginal or hidden vice into an integral part of mainstream sports culture. Contrary to the Court’s rationale, this shift has not simply left each state “free to do as it wishes.” Instead, we have seen precisely what scholars of federalism fear: a race to the bottom, in which states compete to attract gambling giants, slash tax rates, and cut deals that fatten corporate profits while producing minimal revenue or consumer protections.

The main thrust of my critique, however, is not simply that Murphy created poor social policy. The deeper error, in my view, was a misapplication of the Tenth Amendment’s anti-commandeering principle and a disregard for the real-world consequences that attended the demise of PASPA. By assuming that Congress lacked the authority to prohibit states from authorizing sports betting, the Court ignored the federal government’s historically expansive power to regulate conduct with significant interstate dimensions. Although PASPA might have been imperfect in many respects, it was the one legal bulwark that had for decades prevented the flood of legal sports wagering we now confront. Because neither party in Washington currently has the will to enact new legislation that squares with the Court’s directive, Murphy functionally created an unregulated environment — a de facto free-for-all on a practice that a previous generation regarded as dangerously addictive and ethically suspect.

This essay aims to examine, in detail, the flaws in the Murphy Court’s reasoning, the immediate and ongoing costs of unrestrained sports gambling, and the sort of robust regulatory action (or possible outright prohibition) that might yet mitigate the damage. The stakes are high. As the revenue figures and legislative expansions multiply, so too do the body counts of problem gambling, financial catastrophe, match-fixing, and corruption. From the vantage point of someone who has watched and chronicled this transformation, it is hard not to think that the Supreme Court’s decision, grounded supposedly in a fidelity to states’ rights, overlooked the profound harm that unregulated vice inflicts upon our “laboratories of democracy.”

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