The Life Assurance Act 1774 voided life-insurance policies where the person benefiting had no insurable interest in the life insured

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Parliament's 14 Geo. 3 c. 48, the Life Assurance Act 1774, opens by naming the problem it solves: "Whereas it hath been found by experience that the making insurances on lives or other events wherein the assured shall have no interest hath introduced a mischievous kind of gaming." The statute responds to decades of policies written on strangers and public figures purely as bets on when they would die — a practice its own preamble calls "gaming," not insurance.

The Act's fix is narrow against how sweeping the preamble sounds: four sections, voiding any policy made "by way of gaming or wagering" where the person for whose benefit it was made had no interest in the life or event insured, and excluding marine insurance from its scope entirely. It does not ban the resale or assignment of a policy as such — a point that matters for reading the vault's own Amicable Society material, where policies were offered for sale from at least 1711 and assigned to creditors as loan collateral. Both of those uses kept the original holder's own insurable interest in frame; what the 1774 Act targeted was insuring a life in which the policyholder had no stake at all.

The Act is the statutory close of a cultural practice — insuring strangers' lives as a form of wager — that the vault had not previously connected to its own early life-assurance material. It surfaced while checking whether James Dodson's pricing reform bridged to the 1711 Amicable sale; it does not (see observation-dodson-1711-amicable-cosine-pairing-is-embedding-false-friend). Geoffrey Clark's Betting on Lives (1999), the standard modern account of this wagering culture, remains unread by the vault directly (see entity-geoffrey-clark).