The Next Courtroom Test of New York's Gambling Law Comes on September 14, and Kalshi Is Not the Plaintiff

A federal judge in Manhattan will hear argument on September 14, 2026 on a prediction market exchange's request to enjoin New York's Attorney General and the members of the State Gaming Commission, and as of September 2, 2026 the exchange asking for that order is not Kalshi. Judge Lorna G. Schofield set the hearing in an order signed August 18, 2026 (Doc 60) and fixed it for 11:00 A.M. in Courtroom 1106 of the Thurgood Marshall United States Courthouse.

The case is North American Derivatives Exchange, Inc., d/b/a OG v. James, 1:26-cv-04980 in the Southern District of New York. The exchange moved for a preliminary injunction (Doc 39); the state officials opposed it on July 27, 2026 with a declaration running to dozens of exhibits (Doc 51); OG filed its reply on August 17 (Doc 59), under a 5,000-word cap the court allowed on August 11 (Doc 57) after a letter motion the day before. The case was reassigned from Judge Victor Marrero to Judge Schofield on August 5, 2026.

Four cases, one courtroom, one judge

Judge Schofield is not handling this dispute alone. Her order of August 7, 2026 (Doc 53) is written for a group of captioned actions at once: it directs counsel in every one of them to appear for a single initial pretrial conference, requires four separate joint status letters of no more than five pages each by August 11, and specifies that the conference in New York v. Coinbase Financial Markets, Inc., No. 26 Civ. 3300 would be called first, with the others called sequentially by case number in ascending order.

Three days later that schedule moved. The state officials asked on August 10 to bring the conference forward to August 13 or another earlier date (Doc 54). The court instead pushed it back, to August 31 at 11:00 A.M. in the same courtroom (Doc 55), and in the same order set a preliminary injunction hearing for September 14, 2026 at 11:00 A.M. in what the order calls United States v. New York, Case No. 26 Civ. 3404. The joint status letter in the OG case went in on August 11 (Doc 58). The initial conference was held as rescheduled on August 31, and an order issued that day (Doc 62) has no text in the public record, so nothing is stated here about what it says.

The cluster matters for reading the September 14 date. The two other case numbers Judge Schofield's own orders name, 26 Civ. 3300 and 26 Civ. 3404, are not this one, and the four status letters she required are four separate cases' worth. One of those captions has New York as the plaintiff and one has New York as the defendant. New York's prediction market litigation is not one case with one answer; it is a set of them, and a single judge is running four together on a shared calendar.

The enforcement power the motion is aimed at

What OG is asking to be restrained from is the state's licensing regime for sports wagering, and that regime is specific enough to name. The Gaming Commission holds general jurisdiction over all gaming activities in New York and over the corporations, associations and persons engaged in them, including the regulation of sports wagering, under Racing Law sections 104(1) and 104(24), and it is empowered to levy and collect civil penalties and fines for any Racing Law violation under section 104(9).

The operative prohibitions are two sentences long each. Racing Law section 1367-a(2)(a) provides that no entity shall administer, manage, or otherwise make available a mobile sports wagering platform to persons located in New York state unless licensed with the commission. Section 1367-a(4)(b) provides that no entity shall directly or indirectly operate an unlicensed sports wagering platform in the state of New York, or advertise or promote such unlicensed platform to persons located in the state of New York. In-person sports wagering is confined to licensed casinos by section 1367(2)(a). "Sports wagering" is defined at section 1367(1)(x) as wagering on sporting events or any portion of them, or on the individual performance statistics of athletes, by any system or method of wagering, including electronic communication through internet websites accessed via a mobile device or computer and mobile device applications. "Mobile sports wagering platform" is defined at section 1367(1)(k) as the combination of hardware, software and data networks used to manage, administer or control sports wagering and any associated wagers accessible by electronic means.

Those are the provisions the Commission relied on when its executive director, Robert Williams, wrote to KalshiEX LLC on October 24, 2025 demanding that it cease and desist from making an unlicensed mobile sports wagering platform available in New York, and they are the provisions an injunction for OG would stop the Attorney General and the commissioners from enforcing against this plaintiff while the case is decided. A refusal would leave them free to act. Neither result decides the separate proceeding the Attorney General brought against Kalshi, which sits before a different judge on a different question and is covered in the remand motion that has stalled the state's own case.

What New York put in front of the judge

The state's opposition is not a brief on its own. Doc 51, the declaration of Katherine Rhodes Janofsky filed for the state officials on July 27, 2026, attaches twenty-nine exhibits, and the docket's own list of them is a map of the argument the state is making.

Several are federal regulatory records: a Commodity Futures Trading Commission designation dated February 18, 2004, a January 14, 2025 CFTC review of Nadex sports contracts and a CFTC letter to Nadex about contracts of the same date, a February 4, 2026 item on the withdrawal of a proposed rule and a staff advisory, and an April 30, 2026 comment letter from forty states. Several are corporate: the exchange's own available-markets and United States coverage pages, its geo-restriction page dated June 26, 2026, contract screenshots from the same day, and trade-press items from early February 2026 on the launch of the OG brand. Several go to other states: an October 2025 item on the Nevada dispute, a December 2025 item on Arizona, and a stipulated geofencing order involving Kalshi in Nevada dated July 24, 2026. The last group is about harm: an April 2025 addiction data bulletin from the New York State Office of Addiction Services and Supports, and reporting from May 2026 on age limits and on gambling addiction.

Nothing in a docket description says how a judge will weigh any of it. What the list does establish is the shape of the record on September 14: a motion, a reply capped at 5,000 words, and an opposition built on federal filings, the exchange's own pages, other states' proceedings and New York's public health data.

The same company, two names

The caption repays a second look. On August 31, 2026 the state officials lodged a notice of supplemental authority in the injunction motion (Doc 61), attaching three decisions the Ninth Circuit issued on August 28, 2026: KalshiEX, LLC v. Assad, No. 25-7516; North American Derivatives Exchange, Inc. d/b/a Crypto.com v. Nevada, No. 25-7187; and Robinhood Derivatives, LLC v. Dreitzer, No. 25-7831. The docket names the three as exhibits and says nothing about what the state draws from them.

The middle caption is the plaintiff in front of Judge Schofield. The exchange litigating against New York as OG is the same corporation that litigated against Nevada as Crypto.com, and the state filed a decision about it into its own case two weeks before the argument. The docket in New York now runs to more than a hundred entries, with three further applications for out-of-state counsel to appear filed on September 1, 2026.

What is next, and when

The hearing is scheduled for 11:00 A.M. on September 14, 2026, in Courtroom 1106 at 40 Foley Square, and the order that set it fixes the time and the place and nothing else. No ruling date is set, and the initial pretrial conference has already been held, so the September date is the next event on this docket that the public record puts a time on. New York's third exchange case, brought by Ludlow Exchange, LLC, has its own deadline six days earlier and is covered in the state's first required brief in the Ludlow case. Filings across New York's exchange cases are listed on the legal status page.