Case 3:25-cv-06162-JSC Document 71 Filed 11/10/25 Page 6 of 13
stakes games usually associated with Nevada- style gambling.” In re Indian Gaming , 331 F.3d at
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1097. IGRA provides “ Class III gaming activities shall be lawful on Indian lands only if such
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activities are ” authorized by a tribal ordinance or resolution, located in a state where such
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activities are legal, and conducted in conformance with a Tribal-State compact. 25 U.S.C.
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2710(d)(1). IGRA also exempts from the Johnson Act “gaming conducted under a Tribal -State
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compact that is … entered into by a state in which gambling devices are legal.” 25 U.S.C.
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2710(d)(6).
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B. UIGEA’s Statutory Back ground
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“The UIGEA was passed to regulate online gambling.” State of California v. Iipay Nation
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of Santa Ysabel , 898 F.3d 960, 964 (9th Cir. 2018). Congress enacted the UIGEA to address a
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patchwork of state laws regulating online gambling in the advent of the internet. See id. at 965.
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The UIGEA makes it unlawful to engage in “unlawful Internet gambling,” which means:
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to place, receive or otherwise knowingly transmit a bet or wager by any means which involves the use … of the Internet where such bet or wager is unlawful under any applicable Federal or State law in the State or Tribal lands in which the bet or wager is initiated, received, or otherwise made.
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31 U.S.C. § 5362(10)(A). So , “[u]nlike IGRA or other gambling regulations, the UIGEA does not
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make gambling legal or illegal directly. ” Iipay Nation , 898 F.3d at 965. Instead, the UIGEA
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“ create[s] a system in which a ‘bet or wager’ must be legal both where it is ‘initiated’ and where it
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is ‘received.’” Id. As the Ninth Circuit has explained:
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This requirement makes sense in light of how the internet operates. If a bet merely had to be legal where it was received, a bettor could place an illegal bet (on a game of poker, for instance) from anywhere in the United States, so long as the bet was legal in the jurisdiction hosting the servers for a game (Las Vegas or Atlantic City, for instance, in the case of online poker). In effect, the UIGEA prevents using the internet to circumvent existing state and federal gambling laws, but it does not create any additional substantive prohibitions.
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Id.
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Significantly , the UIGEA excludes from its definition of “bet or wager” several types of
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transactions. For example, the UIGEA does not prohibit “intrastate transactions”– that is,
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transactions where “the bet or wager is initiated and received or otherwise made exclusive ly
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