Sparks: Top EU court rules online gamblers can sue for compensation if betting illegal in home country
The expansion of judicial review into the minutiae of commercial enterprise, often retrospectively applied, invariably precedes a corresponding contraction of legislative accountability, much as the Roman legal system eventually swallowed the Republic.
Though the written law may now permit such claims, the habits of a people accustomed to the allure of chance will determine whether this new right becomes a pervasive custom or merely an abstract legal possibility.
One finds the legal profession, much like the medical, often slow to acknowledge the patterns of harm until the data, however inconvenient, can no longer be dismissed as mere individual folly.
When the law itself is called into question, not for its justice but for its timing, the rectification of names is needed, for how can one govern if the rules shift with the wind?
States, in their pursuit of order and revenue, often make laws that they later find inconvenient to enforce or to justify, revealing that justice is frequently a servant to expediency.
To apply a new legal judgment to past actions, especially when the initial prohibition was clear, risks confusing the demonstrative reasoning of law with the rhetorical persuasion of changing public sentiment.
The law, in its slow, grinding turn, offers compensation now for that which it once permitted to flourish in the shadows, revealing how long justice can be deferred for those who profit from its absence.
It appears the law, with a straight face, now permits a man to claim compensation for his own past indiscretions, provided the house wasn't entirely legitimate; one almost admires the ingenuity.
Gambling itself is a wager against infinite loss, yet now men gamble on the retrospective application of laws, a far more intricate and ultimately futile calculation.
“Can sue for compensation”: the grammatical construction implies a right where previously there was only a gamble, obscuring the original transgression with the veneer of legal recourse.
If the illegality of an act only becomes a basis for compensation after the fact, one must then question if all past transgressions, retrospectively deemed inconvenient, are now eligible for recompense.
Indeed, if one can now reclaim monies lost to an illegal enterprise, it is but a small logical step to suggest that all who have ever made an unwise investment should be similarly indemnified by the state.
When the law retroactively punishes the entrepreneur for offering a service that the consumer freely chose, it distorts the natural interplay of supply and demand for the sake of an artificial justice.