Three quarters of the British population gamble (mainly on the National Lottery), and they generate around 46 billion pounds a year.
This volume sets recent developments in the regulation and deregulation of its three primary forms - betting, gaming, and lotteries - against an account of their social and legal history.
Many of the concerns that excite controversy today are little different from those with which the Home Office grappled for most of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
Based upon Home Office files and contemporary accounts, this book begins by evaluating how the law was used to control and suppress popular gambling. Miers shows how and why prohibition gave way to the recognition that regulation offered a more effective method of controlling a social pastime that, by the mid-twentieth century, had become a feature of everyday life.
Concerns over gambling have recently resurfaced, as a result of Government proposals to replace the existing strict controls with a regulatory regime that will give greater scope for licensees to adopt more competitive practices. Like the introduction of the National Lottery in 1994, these proposals represent a marked departure from the traditional response: to permit but not to stimulate commercial gambling. The potential for expansion in opportunities to gamble raises concerns about the accessibility of gambling to children and the possibility of increased numbers of problem gamblers. Miers examines the implementation and impact of the present law governing gaming and the National Lottery in terms of regulation and the enforcement of regulatory regimes. He focusses on how these regimes regulate the probity of the supplier, the supply of gambling opportunities, the nature of the transaction, and the player's participation. The book concludes with an evaluation of the Gambling Bill, a draft of which was published in 2003 aiming to give effect to the Government's proposals.
By:
David Miers (Professor of Law Cardiff University)
Imprint: Oxford University Press
Country of Publication: United Kingdom
Dimensions:
Height: 242mm,
Width: 163mm,
Spine: 36mm
Weight: 973g
ISBN: 9780198256724
ISBN 10: 0198256728
Series: Oxford Socio-Legal Studies
Pages: 560
Publication Date: 01 October 2004
Audience:
Professional and scholarly
,
Undergraduate
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Active
PART ONE: THEN 1: Gaming in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries 2: Gaming in the Early Nineteenth Century: The Gaming Act 1845 3: Gaming in the Late Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries 4: Gaming Machines: The Challenge of New Technology 5: The Rise and Fall of the State Lottery: The State Lotteries 1694-1826 6: The Re-emergence of Private and Semi-private Lotteries: 1823-1922 7: From the Local to the National: The Re-emergence of The Public Lottery 8: Betting and Bookmaking: Social class and the racecourse bookmaker 9: Street Betting: Enacting Prohibition 10: Street Betting: Prohibition and its Consequences 11: Going to the Dogs: Gambling, Leisure, and the Home Office PART TWO: NOW 12: The Social and Economic Regulation of Commercial Gambling: A Model 13: The Regulation of Commercial Gaming 14: The Regulation of the National Lottery 15: The Implementation of the National Lottery: Concerns and Consequences 16: Deregulation and Structural Change
David Miers is Professor of Law at Cardiff University.
Reviews for Regulating Commercial Gambling: Past, Present, and Future
`Miers leads us with thoroughness and authority but also with an agreeable lightness of touch through all the main pieces of gambling legislation...Miers' book however, is not simply a fine resource for anyone interested in UK gambling law. It is also a fascinating social history and implies an exploration of profound issues in political theory about the freedom of individuals to choose how to live their own lives...Miers gives a fine, lucid and accurate account of the legal and political thinking which led up to the new Bill in its 2004 form...no serious student of gambling can afford to be without this book.' Peter Collins, Society for the study of Gambling, Newsletter 39
