With the sixth-century emperor Justinian, however, imperial policy towards gambling underwent a profound change in the attitude that informed new legislation, if not in the actual efficacy of enforcement. Guiding this shift in official attitudes toward gambling was a threefold policy objective: (1) concern for protecting the assets of tax-paying imperial subjects (many of whom also had additional financial and service obligations in their native cities), (2) concern for the public morals, and (3) concern for weeding out frivolous clerics.

In this Article, Part II examines Roman attitudes towards gambling, at least as exemplified in the surviving literary sources from the second century BCE to the fourth century CE. Part III discusses what constituted illegal gambling (alea) under Roman public (i.e., criminal) law and how, if at all, the statutory prohibitions were enforced in practice. Part IV will address Roman private law pertaining to gambling, including both the limited remedies available to losers in dice games and the bars to recovery for injury and property damage for owners or operators of backroom gambling establishments. Part V, finally, will examine the efforts of the Byzantine Emperor Justinian to revitalize and expand the existing law on civil and criminal gambling in the sixth-century CE.

These cases illustrate the difficult nature of determining the respective rights of parties to the tip. Section I of this Note develops a theory to assist the practitioner in conceptualizing those rights. I call this theory the “Nexus of the Tip.” Section II reviews the historical underpinning and the current practice of tipping, and also reviews the social and economic literature that has attempted to describe the contours of the custom. Section II.A will introduce the reader to the tipping bestowment inquiry, which defines initial parameters for determining how and to whom a consumer intends to tip. Section II.B introduces the reader to the alternative to the tip, the service charge.

At the center of the tension concerning sovereign immunity lies 11 U.S.C. § 106(a), which authorizes the bankruptcy court to abrogate state sovereign immunity. In the past fifteen years, the United States Supreme Court issued three key decisions concerning the federal government’s ability to abrogate statutorily states’ sovereign immunity pursuant to its Article I power and the bankruptcy court’s unique position in the long standing controversy. The states’ ability to assert their sovereign immunity in bankruptcy proceedings is particularly relevant to casino bankruptcies due to the heavy involvement of the state gaming regulator. With the Bankruptcy Code in question, state governmental units and the jurisdiction of the bankruptcy court are in direct conflict.

This Note outlines the historical context, relevant Supreme Court decisions, and the cloudy, ill-defined area in which bankruptcy courts are authorized to abrogate states’ sovereign immunity. Additionally, this Note explores the analysis courts use when determining whether a regulatory agency’s power to revoke licenses is exempted from the automatic stay. Lastly, this Note argues that the three recent Supreme Court cases restored order to the bankruptcy court’s ability to pierce the sovereign immunity of a regulatory agency during a license revocation hearing of a casino debtor.

This Article, will first describe the basis upon which the District Attorney acts as a collection agent for casinos and then demonstrate that this basis is wholly without support under the law of negotiable instruments. To render the discussion concrete, this Article refers to the recent high-profile case in which Terrance Watanabe was prosecuted by the Clark County District Attorney for refusing to pay $14.75 million in casino markers, a refusal that was motivated by his ongoing legal dispute with the casinos that held the markers. This Article concludes that the strong intuition that there is something fundamentally wrong with the State of Nevada using its police power to collect unpaid loans owed to casinos, and accepting a substantial fee for doing so, turns out to be wholly in accord with the applicable law as properly understood.