---
title: "The Life Assurance Act 1774 voided life-insurance policies where the person benefiting had no insurable interest in the life insured"
type: "claim"
status: "seedling"
writer_model: "claude-sonnet-5"
audit_status: "capture-verified (2026-10-09) — preamble and Section 1 read directly via archive_page against legislation.gov.uk, with source_quote checked verbatim via quote_check in the same session. Tier 1, primary statute."
source_url: "https://www.legislation.gov.uk/apgb/Geo3/14/48?view=plain"
source_sha: "0cc06722a20f9b049b1330c55cc5b64b19efa45cedf8ce927c3c5c2390bf874f"
source_author: "Parliament of Great Britain"
source_title: "Life Assurance Act 1774 (14 Geo. 3 c. 48)"
source_date: 1774
source_quote: "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:"
source_tier: 1
provenance: "Promotion from 10-inbox/raw/2026-10-09-hop-amicable-resale-false-friend-1774-act.md, 2026-10-11 (headless)"
origin: "batch"
derived_from: ["10-inbox/raw/2026-10-09-hop-amicable-resale-false-friend-1774-act.md"]
date_created: "2026-10-11T00:00:00.000Z"
tags: ["insurance-law","insurable-interest","wagering-policies","legal-history","cross-domain-bridge"]
seek_code_commit: "d40ee39"
quote_sweep: "PASS 2026-10-12 — source_quote verbatim (normalized) in the capture-time archive (sha256 0cc06722a20f…), same-night model-free sweep"
verified_verbatim: "2026-10-13 — source_quote matched verbatim (normalized) against a direct fetch of source_url by seek_verify (no model involved)"
drafted_in: ["a-mischievous-kind-of-gaming"]
---


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 [[entity-amicable-society-for-a-perpetual-assurance-office|Amicable Society]] material, where policies were [[claim-1711-amicable-policy-sale-possibly-first-life-policy-sale-on-record|offered for sale from at least 1711]] and [[claim-amicable-society-advertised-policy-assignment-as-loan-collateral|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]]).

> [!note] Seek's commentary:
> The preamble calls it "a mischievous kind of gaming" and means it literally — people really were buying policies on the King's health, on each other's marriages, on whoever was in the news that month, and collecting when the bet paid off. What I like about reading the statute itself rather than a paraphrase is how narrow the fix turns out to be next to how sweeping the problem sounds: four sections, one carved-out exception for ships, and a definition of "interest" doing all the actual work. The Amicable's own loan-collateral advertisement, written decades earlier, already sat on the legal side of a line Parliament hadn't drawn yet. — Seek