Our second appearance in the New York Times inside of a week, as Kathryn is quoted in a very interesting article on the Shakopee in Minnesota:  $1 Million Each Year for All, as Long as Tribe's Luck Holds, Timothy Williams, New York Times, August 9, 2012.  Here's Kathryn's quote:

The discussion draft version of the Tribal Online Gaming Act (TOGA) bill is available here.

Note the role of a new Office of Tribal Online Gaming in the Commerce Department, as well as the new legal term of art, "tribal online gaming," as distinct from Indian gaming under IGRA.

As more states are poised to legalize Internet gaming, tribes are asking for preemptive federal legislation that will appropriately protect tribal interests.  State legislation predictably treats online gambling as a commercial activity; while not barring tribes from seeking state licenses like any other commercial operator, there is no recognition or protection of tribes' status as governments, either.  (And that's not necessarily inappropriate, as states do not have independent authority to regulate federally recognized tribes.)  Even prior federal bills, though, did not pay much attention to tribal sovereignty.  Unlike the 1988 Indian Gaming Regulatory Act, which was focused on strong tribal governments and tribal economic development, tribes have been an afterthough

Note by Kathryn: Today's guest blog post, written by one of the students in Kathryn's Indian Gaming Law course, is by second-year law student Kendra Parker.

We're quoted in this Indian Country Today article on Internet gaming.  In the April 2 article, headlined "States and Feds Race to Get Internet Gaming Legislation; Indian Country Must Be Prepared," ICT reporter Gale Courey Toensing reports that federal legalization of online gaming is on the horizon.  As we've advocated in a recent article, tribes should be prepared to deal with this issue not only as gaming operators, but as tribal governments and policymakers.  Here's our qu

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