On this day (March 19) in 1931, the Governor of Nevada (Fred Balzar) signed two historic bills into law. One was a new “quickie divorce” law (see here, for example), making the Silver State the easiest place to get a divorce in the nation. The other was “The Wide Open Gambling Bill of 1931” (see here and here), which legalized games of chance across the State. (At the time, Nevada was the nation’s least populous state. See also this history of gaming in the Silver State.) My counter-factual question, however, is this: If Nevada had not enacted these modern-day laws in 1931, surely another State would have eventually done so, but which one? California? Florida? New York?
