Passions and Reason in the Gambling Law

The goal of this paper is to present the haphazard status of games for money in our private law which is both heavily influenced by ancient moral values and assailed by demands to accommodate the players' bets based on chance and the goal of collecting their money. The taste for gambling has remained the same and the bans have been progressively lifted. The Internet and the European Commission have been very influential in that respect. But one of the consequences of this normative evolution has been the inconsistency of the source of law: the old civil code -- the French common law quite conservative on this matter -- remains unchanged, while the more and more liberal specialized law is flourishing on the side. Re-encoding the legal status of the gambling contract does not seem a luxury. Adapted from the source document.