California tribes secure first injunction against Kalshi sports contracts

A federal judge in San Francisco has ordered Kalshi to stop offering sports event contracts on the lands of two California tribes, marking the first preliminary injunction any tribe has won against the prediction market operator, according to SBC Americas.

The motion was granted on Wednesday by Northern District of California judge Jacqueline Scott Corley in the case Blue Lake Rancheria v. Kalshi, after the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals had ruled in the tribes' favour in September.

The one-page order bars Kalshi from offering "any sports contracts" on the plaintiff tribes' Indian lands, spanning sports such as football, soccer, basketball, baseball, hockey, tennis, golf, boxing, wrestling, mixed martial arts under the UFC banner, motorsports, chess, eSports and pickleball.

Under the order, the tribes must give Kalshi maps of their California land boundaries by November 13. Kalshi will then have 21 days to file a report with the court setting out how it has complied.

The ruling reverses Corley's own earlier position. In November 2025 she denied the tribes' first bid for an injunction, concluding that success under either the Indian Gaming Regulatory Act (IGRA) or the Lanham Act was unlikely, and classifying Kalshi's yes-or-no contracts as products falling within the scope of the Commodity Exchange Act.

A unanimous Ninth Circuit panel rejected that approach in September, concluding that both Blue Lake Rancheria and Chicken Ranch Rancheria of Me-Wuk Indians stand a good chance of proving that Kalshi's sports contracts breach IGRA and their own gaming ordinances whenever users place them from tribal territory. Judge M. Margaret McKeown wrote that "Kalshi may reshuffle the cards, but it cannot change the hand: Its sports event contracts are class III gaming."

The panel also rejected Kalshi's argument that the relevant activity takes place solely at its New York exchange and servers, concluding instead that a contract sits on Indian lands whenever it is purchased from within tribal territory. It ruled that even if the contracts were swaps, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission's exclusive jurisdiction under the CEA would not displace IGRA. The court did uphold dismissal of the tribes' Lanham Act false-advertising claim, before sending the case back to Corley so she could weigh irreparable harm alongside the balance of equities and the wider public interest.

A comparable dispute in Wisconsin went the other way. William Conley, a U.S. District Judge there, rejected the Ho-Chunk Nation's bid for an injunction against Kalshi and Robinhood back in May; he let the tribe's underlying IGRA claims move forward but found no irreparable harm, noting the absence of any evidence that casino revenue had fallen or that even one customer had switched to Kalshi. It was on that point — irreparable harm — that the California tribes succeeded where Ho-Chunk had not.

The California order lands amid a wider, unresolved fight over who has authority to regulate sports event contracts. The Ninth Circuit ruled on August 28 in Kalshi's Nevada case that its sports contracts are likely not CEA-protected swaps, clearing state regulators to enforce gaming law, and on Wednesday the same panel denied Kalshi's bid for rehearing and rehearing en banc.

The Third Circuit reached the opposite conclusion in April, finding the CEA likely preempts New Jersey's attempt to regulate Kalshi. New Jersey petitioned the U.S. Supreme Court on September 2, with Robinhood and Crypto.com filing their own petitions afterwards; the Court has extended Kalshi's response deadline to December 7.

A coalition of 130 federally recognised tribes and 15 tribal organisations has filed an amicus brief urging the justices to take up the New Jersey case, joined by briefs from attorneys general in 38 states and Washington, D.C., along with the NFL and the American Gaming Association.