Cutting the Wire

Federal law still shapes how Americans can bet online, and this book traces where those limits come from. It begins with the 1961 Wire Act, a statute aimed at organized crime's use of telephone lines for sports betting and passed during Robert F. Kennedy's tenure as attorney general. The author follows how a law written for bookmakers in the pre-internet era came to be read as covering digital gambling.

David G. Schwartz, a historian of gambling, examines the legal fights, regulatory choices and policy debates that followed, showing how the Wire Act became a central question for online gaming. The book suits readers interested in gambling policy, the history of federal criminal law and the collision between older statutes and new technology.