Schenck

Plaintiffs and one Coyne wagered five hundred dollars each upon the event of an election. Defendant acted as the stakeholder. After the election had been held and the result declared, a proceeding in contest of the election was instituted, and before the money had been paid over or the contest decided, plaintiffs in writing notified the stakeholder that they repudiated the wager and demanded the return of the five hundred dollars deposited by them. Their demand was refused. The foregoing is a brief statement of the facts set out in the complaint of plaintiffs, to which complaint defendant interposed a demurrer. The trial court sustained the demurrer without leave to plaintiffs to amend, and from the judgment which followed plaintiffs appealed.

Contracts of wager, or betting, fall generally within a class which are said to be void because they contravene the policy of the law. It will serve no useful purpose here to trace the course of judicial decisions in dealing with actions growing out of such disputes, further than to observe that betting contracts were in early English times allowed to be enforced in the courts, but that later it became the settled view of the judges that…