Pratik Chougule interviewed Richard Hanania, a plaintiff in PredictIt’s lawsuit against the CFTC, on a recent episode of Star Spangled Gamblers.

They discuss Hanania’s takeaways from his involvement in the lawsuit and brainstorm pathways to legalizing prediction markets. 

Below are some excerpts 

Vivek Ramaswamy’s Potential Support for Prediction Markets

Hanania: I never thought about just bringing up prediction markets to Vivek. But, yeah, maybe we can get him, you know, just like he promised me on civil rights law, maybe we can get him to promise something on prediction markets. I think he would love that actually. That would be, I think, his kind of issue.

Chougule: What we often see is that, whatever the fighting is in the primary, all the different issues that these candidates bring to the fore—they all tend to kind of get consolidated in whoever gets the nomination. So even if you have a high-profile candidate like Vivek just even mentioning that he might support prediction markets, that’s the kind of thing that helps create the mandate to do something about the issue.

Fifth Circuit’s Decision in the PredictIt Case

Hanania: My reading between the lines of the way the Fifth Circuit is ruling in the PredictIt case is that they like prediction markets. The judges that are hearing the case like prediction markets and don’t like what the government is doing here. This makes me optimistic not only in this case, but optimistic in the federal judiciary.

The Judiciary as an Avenue for Legalizing Prediction Markets

Hanania: I think people really need to be thinking about convincing lawyers, law professors, and then ultimately, legal clerks and judges just how good prediction markets are. And then the legal arguments are just a fig leaf.