The U.S Supreme Court voted today to effectively allow states to legalize sports betting.
The nation’s highest court voted 6-3 to strike down a federal law banning states from sponsoring, advertising or authorizing sports gambling, a move that will dramatically open the door to an expansion of legal sports betting.
For the past 25 years, if Americans wanted to bet legally sports, Nevada was the only state where they could gamble on individual games. Now with this Supreme Court decision paves the way for legal sports betting nationwide. This decision means that states can now legalize and regulate sports gambling on their own without interference from the federal government.
The Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act of 1992 came into effect in 1993 to ban sports gambling in most of the United States. At the time of its adoption, Nevada and three other states had already authorized some form of sports gambling and were allowed to continue doing so.
Today the justices said that the law violated the states’ rights and the constitutional principles that limit the control of the federal government over the states.
The gaming industry is calling this a groundbreaking decision that will revolutionize the gambling business.
The case came to the country’s highest court from New Jersey, which has been trying to legalize sports betting for years and has said it will have everything ready to start taking bets in a couple of weeks.
More than 15 other states are expected to follow in the next year or so and as many as 32 states could offer it within the next five years.
As much as $150 billion is spent on illegal sports betting in the U.S every year.
