• Lawmakers first became concerned about the slippery slope between life insurance and gambling during the third quarter of the eighteenth century, when the industry still catered to a relatively small, mostly aristocratic market.²
• Their concern grew out of a rash of cases in which people had taken out policies on the lives of perfect strangers, often celebrities, on the morbid chance that they would die prematurely.³
• As Geoffrey Clark has noted, the Hanoverian gentry preferred this form of gambling over nearly all other varieties; a quarter of all bets in one gentleman's club in the 1770s was on the death of a third party, compared to only 2.5% on horse races.⁴

• 2. See GEOFFREY CLARK, BETTING ON LIVES: THE CULTURE OF LIFE INSURANCE IN
  ENGLAND 1695-1775, 49 (Manchester University Press 1999).

- LR - A License To Bet: Life Insurance And The Gambling Act In The British Courts, Timothy Alborn