New Jersey’s Thoroughbred Horsemen Association (NJTHA) played a role in the saga to overturn the sports betting ban, a saga thought to be the province of the casinos in Atlantic City. The horsemen filed suit in an effort to claim millions in damages from the NFL and other organizations opposed to sports betting.
The suit got a boost this month when a U.S. Third Circuit Court of Appeals three-judge panel vacated a lower court’s ruling that had dismissed their claim. This marks the third 2-1 split sports betting verdict by a panel on the Third Circuit.
“It’s nice when a plan comes together,” Dennis Drazin, who operates Monmouth Park for the New Jersey Thoroughbred Horsemen’s Association, told NJ Online Gambling. “At some point, maybe the leagues will listen to me.”
Monmouth Park has generated around $27 million in revenue since New Jersey sports betting launched in June of last year. That is just for year one without a mature market for online sports betting, said Play NJ.
The previous 2-1 sports betting rulings went in favor of the leagues, leading the horsemen to appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court both times. After getting passed over on the first try, the horsemen had better luck with the court in 2017, leading to the landmark May 2018 voiding of the Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act of 1992 that had prevented 49 states from offering full-scale sports betting that Nevada has offered for 70 years.
But this time, the case simply goes back to U.S. District Court Judge Michael Shipp, who 10 months ago had dismissed even the relatively modest $3.4 million bond claim by the horsemen. The rest of the $150 million would come if the horsemen can convince Shipp that they deserve far greater compensation for being stymied for four years.
In the wake of the Supreme Court ruling, the Horsemen’s Association asked for damages from the leagues that fought for years to keep the federal ban in place and stop sports betting from moving forward.
“Shipp will presumably now be tasked with determining how much money the NCAA, NFL, NHL, MLB and NBA will have to pay the New Jersey Thoroughbred Horsemen’s Association for being wrongfully enjoined during the duration of the legal case,” said Ryan Rodenberg, an associate professor at Florida State University.
Both Shipp and dissenting judge David Porter seemed to have gotten stuck on the same point: that when Shipp issued the temporary restraining order in 2014, he was merely following the direction of his superiors on the Third Circuit at the time. That viewpoint, wrote Judge Marjorie Rendell for the majority along with colleague Theodore McKee, “conflates whether [the horsemen’s association] was ‘wrongfully enjoined,’ with whether the District Court abused its discretion in issuing the TRO.”
Wrote Rendell, “Did it turn out that NJTHA had the right all along to do what they were enjoined from doing? There is no way that the answer to that question could be ‘no.’”
Porter wrote otherwise:
“I see little support for holding that a party was wrongfully enjoined when the District Court faithfully followed our precedent. Had the District Court based the TRO on the constitutional question ultimately decided by the Supreme Court, I would view this matter differently. But that is not what happened here.”
Drazin said he hopes Shipp will now permit discovery in the case, thereby allowing each side to probe for evidence for their cause. One possibility if that happens is for the heavily redacted depositions of sports league commissioners and top executives be unsealed, to see if there is reason to believe that the lawsuit against New Jersey was entered “in bad faith.”
