Overview
Tribal gaming’s first appellate win. Two California tribes, the Blue Lake Rancheria and the Chicken Ranch Rancheria of Me-Wuk Indians, sued Kalshi and Robinhood under the Indian Gaming Regulatory Act, arguing that sports event contracts entered from tribal land are gaming the tribes have not authorized. Judge Jacqueline Scott Corley (N.D. Cal.) denied a preliminary injunction in November 2025. (A third tribe, the Picayune Rancheria, left the appeal in August 2026.)
On September 16, 2026 the Ninth Circuit affirmed in part, reversed in part and remanded in a published opinion by Judge McKeown (Murguia, C.J., McKeown, Paez), argued July 10. It held the tribes likely to succeed on their IGRA claim: Kalshi’s sports event contracts are class III gaming; they are conducted “on Indian lands” when a user enters them from tribal territory; and they are offered in violation of the tribes’ gaming ordinances and the 2024 secretarial procedures that incorporate them, which the court treated as the functional equivalent of a tribal-state compact. It held that the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act does not displace IGRA, and that the Commodity Exchange Act’s grant of “exclusive” jurisdiction to the CFTC does not extend to these contracts — the two statutes, it said, answer different questions. It affirmed the denial on the Lanham Act false-advertising claim, holding that a lay opinion about the contracts’ legality cannot support one.
Read the posture precisely. No injunction has been entered. The panel remanded for Judge Corley to weigh the remaining preliminary-injunction factors, and this is a ruling about gaming on tribal land under a federal statute written for tribes — not a holding that state gambling law governs. It is the second Ninth Circuit loss for the platforms in three weeks, after Assad, and the Ho-Chunk Nation filed it in its own Wisconsin case within a week.