ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the legal treatment of one specific class of safeguards against limited self-control: self-exclusion agreements between casinos and problem gamblers, in which the gambler vows not to return to the casino. It outlines the dimensions of problem gambling and describes the mechanism of self-exclusion schemes. During the past decade, problem gambling has received more attention than before. The application of pharmacological treatment, informed by the studies on neurotransmittors affected by problem gambling and by the treatment of substance-related addictions, may provide yet more evidence that substance-related addictions and pathological gambling share more than the phenomenology, and may be caused in a similar way. Even without the neurological evidence, both common sense and the behavioural evidence about problem gamblers could have told that the decision-making process of problem gamblers is impaired when it comes to gambling. The chapter concludes that the enforcement of self-exclusion agreements by private litigation is preferable to the exclusively public enforcement currently envisaged.
