Over the course of the past 30 or so years, Las Vegas attorney Tony Cabot has been witness to the transformation of gaming law from local into what it is now, international. Not only has gaming law expanded geographically, but also in terms of complexity.
Cue the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, which together with gaming industry professionals is creating the Center on Gaming Regulation and a master’s degree in gaming law.
The center itself will be the creation of both the university’s law school and hotel college. Bo Bernhard, who serves as the executive director of UNLV’s International Gaming Institute, has high hopes for a fall 2015 launch. “The gaming industry is a very strictly scrutinized industry,” he said, “in large part because it’s got a history of bad guys being involved, but there’s never been an academic field dedicated to looking at how you monitor and regulate this very complex and global industry.”
Bernhard admitted that in the past, “the gaming world just wasn’t that big and just wasn’t that complex,” but implores the necessity of this research now due to the ever-growing and changing industry.
At the same time, UNLV Boyd School of Law has announced it will offer a master’s degree in gaming law. The program will launch this fall, and introduce students to federal and American Indian gambling laws, in addition to the principles of casino management. The university currently offers more courses on the gambling industry than any other law school in the country.
