Washington State card room operator Maverick Gaming’s efforts to overturn the state-sanctioned tribal monopoly on sports betting appear to be dead in the water.
Maverick unsuccessfully challenged the tribes’ exclusivity last year when it sued the state and the federal government, arguing that Washington’s sports betting laws amounted to an unconstitutional monopoly.
Last week a panel of 9th Circuit court judges upheld a lower court’s dismissal of the case in February 2023.
Maverick invested heavily in buying up card rooms in Washington after the US Supreme Court rejected the federal prohibition on sports betting in 2018, acquiring 19 venues in 2019 alone. The company was banking on the legislature legalizing commercial sports betting and balked when lawmakers passed a tribal-only bill in 2020.
Sovereign Rights Issue
The operator argued the federal government acted unlawfully when it approved the state’s compact amendments for sports betting. Maverick claimed that as well as breaching the Fifth Amendment’s equal protection clause, the compacts violated the Indian Gaming Regulatory Act (IGRA).
Under IGRA, tribes are permitted to offer certain types of gaming provided they are available in any form elsewhere in the state, which in Washington was not the case, Maverick claimed.
Thus, the law was being used “inappropriately to give tribes exclusive rights to certain types of gaming, such as sports betting, that are not allowed in non-tribal gaming properties in Washington State,” the company argued.
The case became a sovereign rights issue when Maverick moved it to a federal court and the Shoalwater Bay Tribe, which was not a defendant, intervened, seeking to have it dismissed.
In February 2023, lower court judge David Estudillo dismissed the suit, determining that Maverick was attempting to “invalidate tribal gaming compacts, an acknowledged legal entitlement.”
“Maverick seeks nothing less than a wholesale revocation of the tribes’ ability to operate casino gaming facilities,” Estudillo wrote.
Moreover, the judge ruled that the Shoalwater Bay was a required party in the case, but it could not be joined to the litigation because of its sovereign immunity.
Can’t Proceed With or Without Tribe
In its appeal, Maverick argued that the tribe waived its sovereign immunity by voluntarily intervening in this suit. The appellate panel disagreed.
“It is well-established that a tribe’s voluntary participation in litigation for a limited purpose does not constitute a blanket waiver of immunity from suit in general,” the panel wrote. The litigation “cannot proceed in equity and good conscience without the Shoalwater Bay Indian Tribe” because the case is about the tribe’s sovereign and economic interests in gaming exclusivity, the judges added.
IGRA’s very purpose is to confer legal entitlements to the Tribe, and all other federally recognized Indian tribes, in the form of tribal-state gaming compacts. And these tribal-gaming compacts are what Maverick seeks to invalidate,” they concluded.
Maverick CEO Eric Persson, who is ironically a member of the Shoalwater Bay tribe, has previously said that he is prepared to fight the issue in the Supreme Court if necessary.
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