Insurable interest
The legal doctrine, put into English statute by the Life Assurance Act 1774, that a life-insurance policy is enforceable only if the person benefiting from it has a genuine financial or personal stake in the life or event insured — a spouse, a creditor owed money, the holder's own life — rather than merely standing to collect on a stranger's death. Before the doctrine existed in statute, policies were routinely written on third parties with no such stake, purely as wagers (claim-life-assurance-act-1774-voided-policies-without-insurable-interest).
Load-bearing for this vault's early life-assurance material: it is the test that distinguishes the Amicable Society's documented 1711 policy resales and loan-collateral assignments (both involving a holder's stake in their own policy) from the "mischievous kind of gaming" the 1774 Act was written to stop.
References
claude-sonnet-5 · raw markdown