Kent Law School Lecturer Dr Donal Casey is a guest editor for a special issue of the Journal of Law and Social Policy that offers an interdisciplinary exploration of gambling regulation.
The special volume – Volume 30 – comprises 13 articles and has been co-edited by Dr Casey together with Professor Kate Bedford (University of Birmingham) and Dr Alexandra Flynn (University of Toronto). It draws together contributions that straddle the intersections between law and sociology, cultural studies, geography, political science, indigenous studies, history, science and technology studies, gender studies, and political economy.
Dr Casey said: ‘The special issue explores the diverse and grounded reality of gambling regulation, law, and policy in large and small sites across the world, bringing diverse everyday forms and places of play to the fore and tracing the overlapping and sometimes competing work of Indigenous, municipal, provincial, national, supra-national, and transnational regulatory bodies.’
The volume’s introductory article, ‘Keeping Chance in Its Place: The Socio-Legal Regulation of Gambling’ is co-authored by Dr Casey, Professor Bedford and Dr Flynn. Dr Casey is also the sole author of a further article on ‘Risk, Charity, and Boundary Disputes: The Liberalisation and Commercialisation of Online Bingo in the European Union’. In it, he explores the diverse political-economic meaning attached to bingo and how this shapes the regulation of online bingo in EU Member States.
One of the other articles is authored by Kent Law School Professor Toni Williams. In ‘All About That Place: The Curious Case of Bingo Liberalisation in Brazil’, Professor Williams illustrates the way in which the perceived risks attached to bingo in Brazil arose not from the game itself, but rather from the places in which the game was played. She also demonstrates the multiple ways in which place matters to socio-legal accounts of gambling regulation.
Dr Casey is Deputy Director of Education at Kent Law School. He has written extensively about regulatory governance and was a co-investigator for A Full House: Developing A New Socio-Legal Theory of Global Gambling Regulation (The Bingo Project), a three-year research project funded by a £0.5m grant from the Economic and Social Sciences Research Council.
Professor Kate Bedford is Professor of Law at Birmingham Law School. She was principal investigator for The Bingo Project. Dr Alexandra Flynn is an Assistant Professor in the City Studies program at the University of Toronto (Scarborough).