> In 1992, New Jersey Senator and former basketball player Bill Bradley sponsored a Federal law called PASPA, the Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act. This law banned most states from legalizing sports books: businesses that set odds, accepted wagers, and paid out winnings on sports games.

Federal laws (i.e., laws of the United States rather than the individual states) derive their authority from the Constitution. The Tenth Amendment to the Constitution reads: ‘The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.’ No part of the Constitution delegates power to the United States to regulate intrastate sport or gambling; no later amendment repeals the Tenth with respect to sports gambling.

So Congress had no constitutional authority to pass the law in the first place.

I detest sports gambling with a passion, but that doesn’t matter: PASPA was never constitutional. The federal government has legitimate power to regulate interstate gambling and the states each have the ability to regulate intrastate gambling. I don’t think that it should be illegal, but I do think that it should be regulated like other addictive and dangerous things.