Murrill and Landry named as defendants in Kalshi federal suit

Louisiana's Attorney General Liz Murrill received a federal complaint on Friday naming her, Governor Jeff Landry, and three officials from the Louisiana Gaming Control Board as defendants in a lawsuit filed by Kalshi in the US District Court for the Western District of Louisiana.

The proximate cause was a letter LGCB Chair Christopher Hebert sent to state-licensed sportsbooks in December 2025. Hebert told those operators that offering prediction markets on sports would constitute sports wagering under Louisiana law and could put their gaming licenses at risk. Kalshi kept the letter and made it an exhibit. When Louisiana then passed two bills in May 2026 that took effect in August — one expanding the definition of gambling by computer, the other elevating several gambling offenses to racketeering charges carrying up to fifty years' imprisonment — Kalshi concluded the enforcement sequence was complete enough to justify a pre-emptive strike.

The racketeering provision is the sharper edge here. Under the legislation Governor Landry signed, courts can freeze assets and shut down websites not just of operators but of associated companies: payment processors, geolocation providers, media affiliates. Kalshi flagged this in its complaint because the exposure does not stop at its own balance sheet. The network of commercial relationships that keeps a prediction market functioning becomes legally hazardous territory the moment a state attorney general decides to move.

Kalshi's counter-argument rests on a carve-out already written into Louisiana law. The statute that criminalizes gambling by computer explicitly exempts futures, commodities, and similar instruments traded on an exchange. Kalshi is a CFTC-regulated Designated Contract Market. Its lawyers argue the exemption applies by its own terms, and that Hebert's reading of the law to reach a federally licensed exchange represents exactly the Supremacy Clause violation the complaint names.

The newsroom has covered the Utah and New York fronts extensively over the past two days. Louisiana is structurally different, and the difference matters for how this resolves. Utah moved first and the CFTC sued Utah; the federal agency is now on offense in that docket. New York moved through its Gaming Commission and its Attorney General filing a civil damages suit. Louisiana has done neither yet. Kalshi filed before the state pulled the trigger, which is the more aggressive posture and the less common one. A pre-emptive federal complaint forces Louisiana to either litigate or stand down rather than allowing the state to control the timing and form of its own enforcement action.

The filing also marks the first time this litigation has landed in the Fifth Circuit's jurisdiction. That is not incidental. The Fifth Circuit has already drawn what this newsroom called the sharpest legal line in the prediction markets dispute. Kalshi chose this venue, which means its lawyers believe the circuit's existing reasoning gives them structural ground to stand on before a single argument is heard.

Nine states are now in open or imminent legal conflict with Kalshi or the CFTC. The Supreme Court has received New Jersey's petition and has not yet announced whether it will hear the case. Until it does, each new state filing adds a data point to the circuit split the Court will eventually have to resolve, and each pre-emptive federal complaint — Utah's from the CFTC, Louisiana's from Kalshi itself — narrows the window in which a state can act without immediately triggering federal litigation.