Kathryn is scheduled to present at the ABA's National Institute on the Gaming Law Minefield in Las Vegas, Feb. 23-24, 2012.  Her presentation is part of a panel on "Ethics and the Gaming Industry," which will discuss ethical issues faced by lawyers practicing in the gaming industry, with a focus on the relationship between the regulators and the regulated.  Kathryn's presentation will further develop Kathryn&Steve's concept of an "Indian Gaming Ethic" to guide tribal decisionmaking and to inform decisionmaking by non-tribal folks as well.

This Boston Globe editorial encourages "special treatment" for the Mashpee Wampanoag Tribe in Massachusetts. Critics, of course, use the term "special treatment" to signal discrimination against the majority, in this case everyone other than the tribe. But here "special treatment" really means "treatment that takes into account that the Tribe is a government." To treat the Tribe no differently than an individual or a corporation is inappropriate under federal law. Further, as the editorial points out, the Mashpee have an historical and present-day context that the state should care about.

Connecticut policymakers are listening to tribal concerns about online gambling -- including current illegal Internet gaming and the possibility of future state-regulated Internet gaming.  In this CBS story, representatives from the Mashantucket Pequot and the Mohegan Tribes held out the carrot of the tribes' capacity to offer online gaming, should the state choose to legalize it.  As everybody knows, Connecticut profits from Foxwoods and the Mohegan Sun -- this year, the tribes' payments to the state approached $360 million.  Negotiating online gaming with the tribes is an opportunity for the state to confine legalized Internet gambling and possibly to profit from increased tribal-state revenue sharing.  But the tribal representatives brought out a stick, too, stating