In Murphy v. National Collegiate Athletic Association, decided May 14, 2018, the Supreme Court struck down the federal law that had blocked nearly every state from legalizing sports wagering for more than 25 years. The New Jersey sports betting Supreme Court case did not legalize sports betting nationwide. It cleared the federal obstacle so each state could decide the question on its own, and within seven years 39 states plus Washington, D.C., had done so.
The Federal Law New Jersey Was Fighting
Congress passed the Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act (PASPA) in 1992 to freeze the spread of legal sports gambling. The statute made it illegal for any state government to allow, run, or promote betting on amateur or professional sporting events, and it barred private operators from running sports betting under state authorization. The target was state governments and the businesses they might license, not individual bettors.
PASPA grandfathered a handful of states that already permitted some form of sports wagering. Nevada kept its full-service sportsbooks. Delaware and Oregon continued state lottery parlay games tied to sporting events. Montana kept its sports pools and parimutuel sports betting.
New Jersey received a different kind of exception: a one-year window to legalize sports betting in Atlantic City. The legislature never acted in time. That missed deadline shaped the next two decades, as the state’s casino and horse racing industries watched Nevada operate a near-monopoly on full-scale sports wagering.
How the Case Reached the Supreme Court
New Jersey’s push began at the ballot box. In November 2011, voters approved a state constitutional amendment authorizing the legislature to legalize sports wagering at Atlantic City casinos and horse racing tracks, with nearly 64 percent in support. The measure excluded bets on college games involving New Jersey teams or events held in the state.
In 2012, the legislature passed the Sports Wagering Act, creating a licensing framework for casinos and racetracks. The NCAA, NFL, MLB, NBA, and NHL sued in federal court to block it. The district court sided with the leagues, and the Third Circuit affirmed, drawing a distinction between a state repealing its own gambling prohibitions and affirmatively authorizing sports betting. Under that reasoning, PASPA barred only the latter. This first loss became known as Christie I, after then-Governor Chris Christie.
New Jersey tried again in 2014 with a different strategy. The new law avoided the word “authorize” entirely. Rather than creating a licensing system, it simply repealed the state’s own prohibitions on sports wagering, but only for people 21 and older and only at casinos and racetracks. The legislature explicitly stated that the law should not be read as authorizing, licensing, or promoting sports gambling.
The leagues sued again. A district court struck the law down. A divided Third Circuit panel affirmed, and the full circuit reheard the case en banc and reached the same result, though it abandoned the earlier repeal-versus-authorization distinction as unworkable. This round became Christie II. New Jersey petitioned the Supreme Court, which agreed to hear the case. By the time it was argued in December 2017, Phil Murphy had succeeded Christie as governor, and the caption changed to Murphy v. NCAA.
What the Supreme Court Held
Justice Samuel Alito wrote the majority opinion, joined fully by Chief Justice Roberts and Justices Kennedy, Thomas, Kagan, and Gorsuch. Justice Breyer joined most of the opinion but disagreed on one portion, making the core holding a 7-2 decision.
The central question was whether PASPA violated the anti-commandeering doctrine, a constitutional principle rooted in the Tenth Amendment. Congress has the specific powers the Constitution grants it, and the rest belong to the states. What Congress does not have is the power to order state legislatures around. It can regulate conduct directly through federal law, but it cannot force a state to enact, enforce, or maintain a particular state law.
PASPA failed that test. By prohibiting states from “authorizing” sports gambling, the statute effectively required every state to keep its own sports betting ban on the books. The Court saw no meaningful difference between Congress ordering a state to pass a law and Congress forbidding a state from repealing one. Either way, the federal government was dictating the content of state legislation.
That left the question of what to do with the rest of PASPA. The anti-authorization provision was clearly unconstitutional, but the law also separately prohibited states from “sponsoring” or “operating” sports betting, and it barred private operators from acting under state authorization. Six justices concluded that these remaining pieces were too intertwined with the unconstitutional provision to be severed, and struck PASPA down in its entirety. Justices Ginsburg and Sotomayor dissented, arguing that only the anti-authorization provision should fall while the rest of the law survived. Justice Breyer joined that view on the narrow severability point, making that portion of the ruling 6-3.
What the Ruling Did Not Do
The decision did not legalize sports betting across the country. It removed the federal barrier that had kept states from making their own choices. Any state that wanted legal sports betting still had to pass its own legislation and build a regulatory framework covering licensing, permitted formats, minimum age, and taxation.
The ruling also left other federal gambling laws in place. The Wire Act, a 1961 statute, still prohibits anyone in the business of betting from using phone lines or the internet to transmit bets or wagering information across state lines. There is an exception for transmissions between two jurisdictions where the betting is legal, but the law continues to shape how interstate online sports betting operates. It is one reason most legal sportsbooks use geolocation technology to verify that bettors are physically inside state borders.
What Changed After the Ruling
New Jersey began accepting legal sports bets within weeks of the decision, and its market quickly grew into one of the largest in the country. Other states followed at varying speeds. Some moved within months; others spent years debating.
By 2025, 39 states plus Washington, D.C., had legalized sports betting in some form. Americans wagered roughly $167 billion on sports that year, and states collectively took in approximately $2.6 billion in sports betting tax revenue in 2024. State markets look different from one another: some allow only in-person betting at casinos or racetracks, others have embraced mobile and online wagering, minimum ages range from 18 to 21, and operator tax rates run from single digits to more than 50 percent. The professional sports leagues that spent years fighting legalization reversed course after the ruling and signed partnership deals with sportsbook operators.