Murphy v. National Collegiate Athletic Assn.

The Court read "authorize" against the legal setting in which PASPA was enacted. Because sports gambling was generally prohibited by state law at that time, repealing a prohibition did more than passively tolerate betting: it gave affected persons the legal right or authority to conduct sports-gambling operations.

New Jersey's 2014 law selectively lifted its prohibition for adults at particular casinos and racetracks. That selective repeal therefore permitted and empowered sports wagering in the designated places, even though the legislature drafted the statute as a repeal rather than an affirmative authorization.

The narrower interpretation urged by the leagues and the United States would produce no workable line between permissible and impermissible partial repeals. The Court found it implausible that Congress intended such an indeterminate regime.

The Constitution establishes a system of dual sovereignty. Congress has substantial enumerated powers, but it has no general power to issue direct commands to state governments. Under New York v. United States and Printz v. United States, Congress must regulate private persons directly rather than conscript state legislative or executive machinery to carry out federal policy.

PASPA's anti-authorization provision directly dictated what state legislatures could and could not enact. A federal instruction not to enact a state law is no less a command than an instruction to enact one; the affirmative-versus-negative distinction is formal rather than constitutional.

The anticommandeering rule protects individual liberty by preserving the federal-state division of authority. It also promotes political accountability by making clear whether federal or state officials are responsible for a regulatory policy, and it prevents Congress from shifting regulatory costs to the States.

The precedents invoked by the leagues did not save PASPA. Those cases involved federal regulation of states and private parties on equal terms, federal programs that states could decline in favor of federal administration, or modest requirements that state regulators consider federal standards. None upheld a federal law ordering a state legislature to enact or refrain from enacting state regulation.

Preemption follows from the Supremacy Clause when Congress validly exercises an enumerated power to regulate private conduct and state law conflicts with that federal rule. The Supremacy Clause itself is not an independent source of legislative power.

Whether characterized as conflict, express, or field preemption, valid preemption ultimately rests on a federal law that gives private actors federal rights, imposes federal duties on them, or otherwise regulates their conduct. A state rule must then yield because it conflicts with that federal regulation.

PASPA's anti-authorization provision neither prohibited private parties from engaging in sports gambling nor granted them a federal right to do so. Standing alone, it merely told States what their own laws could not provide. It was therefore a direct order to state legislatures, not preemption.

The Court did not decide whether New Jersey's 2014 repeal effectively licensed sports gambling because that question could not affect the result. PASPA's ban on state licensing, like its ban on authorization, directly told state legislatures not to enact a certain kind of law.

Congress may not avoid the anticommandeering rule by changing the label attached to the prohibited state legislative act. A command not to license sports gambling is constitutionally indistinguishable from a command not to authorize it.

The severability inquiry asks whether Congress would have enacted the remaining provisions independently of the invalid ones and whether the remainder can operate consistently with the statute Congress adopted. Courts may not rewrite a statute into a substantially different regulatory scheme.

The bans on states operating, sponsoring, and promoting sports gambling could not remain. Congress enacted PASPA to stop both state-run sports lotteries and state authorization of private casino gambling; allowing the latter while retaining a ban on the former would create a scheme that Congress likely would have regarded as backwards and incoherent.

The restriction on private parties who sponsored, operated, or promoted sports gambling "pursuant to" state law was designed to work alongside the restrictions on state authorization and licensing. Once States were free to legalize sports betting, leaving that private-party provision in place would perversely make betting federally unlawful precisely where state law permitted it.

The advertising provisions also could not stand alone. They would forbid advertising an activity that was otherwise lawful under both federal and state law, a result the Court found unlikely to reflect Congress's intended policy.