UIGEA legal challenge rejected; iMEGA weighing up appeal

A LEGAL challenge to America’s Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act (UIGEA) online gambling ban has been rejected by the US appeals court of Philadelphia.

Washington DC-based lobby group the Interactive Media Entertainment & Gaming Association (iMEGA) challenged the ban on the grounds that Congress failed to clearly define online gambling in the law, making it “critically vague”.

It also challenged UIGEA in that the law compels banks and credit card companies to police online gambling transactions and to use state laws to determine if a transaction is unlawful when only four states have rules explicitly prohibiting egaming, and when no uniform definition of “unlawful Internet gambling” was provided by the US Congress when it created the law.

However a panel of judges ruled yesterday that the law “clearly provides a person of ordinary intelligence with adequate notice of the conduct that it prohibits”.

Upholding a 2008 ruling by judge Mary Cooper in favour of UIGEA, the appeals panel noted that the law “does not itself outlaw any gambling activity, but rather incorporates other federal or state law related to gambling”.

The three-judge panel consisted of Judge Dolores Korman Sloviter, appointed under Jimmy Carter; Thomas Ambro, a Bill Clinton appointee; and Judge Kent Jordan, a George W. Bush appointee.

iMEGA was represented by New Jersey lawyer Eric Bernstein and Stephen Saltzburg, a professor at George Washington University school of law, who are understood to be considering an appeal.

iMEGA has the option of asking for an ‘en banc’ appeal in which the case would be reviewed by all 11 judges in the 3rd circuit, or of appealing to the US Supreme Court.

For more on UIGEA, see August’s US egaming liberalisation feature.