In their latest court filings, the Seminole Tribe and the United States Department of the Interior have articulated a novel, if not legally dubious argument, for reinstating the Tribe’s new gaming compact with the State of Florida. That compact – which became effective for a brief period of time in 2021 – granted the Tribe the exclusive right to operate online sports betting throughout Florida and decreed that all online wagers would be “deemed” to occur “exclusively” on tribal lands where the computer server processing the bet is located, regardless of the bettor’s physical location.

After a federal district judge rejected that proposed structure as a “fiction” designed to “evade” IGRA’s requirement that all gaming activity “authorized” by a compact take place “on Indian lands,” the Tribe and the Department of the Interior began pushing a new narrative. In appellate briefs recently filed with the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals, both entities have argued that the compact did not “authorize” online sports betting at all. Rather, they insist that the compact authorized only in-person betting on tribal lands and that the online sports betting component was authorized solely by Florida state law. As described by the Department of the Interior – and similarly asserted by the Tribe – the sports betting provisions of the compact “reflect a permissible hybrid approach, wherein gaming activity that occurs off of the Tribe’s Indian lands is authorized under state law, and gaming activity that occur on Indian lands is authorized by IGRA pursuant to the Compact.”