Gambling and Futures Contracts; Comparative Study between English and Islamic Law Mohammad Mahdi Hajian 1 and Dr Mohammad Issaei Tafreshi 2 A Futures Contract is an agreement to buy or sell a specific amount of an asset at a particular price on a stipulated future date. A futures contract is a standardized exchange-traded agreement. One of the most important challenges about validity of Futures Contracts is that if such contracts are kind of the Gambling. Especially in Islamic Law, the validity of Futures Contracts faces this problem that the nature of them is similar to Gambling Contracts. It seems that by using legal doctrines, judicial procedure and legislation development, English Law passed the mentioned challenge. In this paper, first, we investigate the approach under which English Law encounter this issue and the elements by which a transaction is a kind of gambling in Islamic Law. Then, regarding distinct differences between Futures Contracts and Gambling Contracts, we try to eliminate the challenge and justify such transactions. JEL Codes: G18, G17 and K12 1. Introduction: “A futures contract is an agreement to buy or sell a specific amount of a commodity or financial instrument at a particular price on a stipulated future date.” (Kamali 2003) Characteristics of a future contract are: First: these contracts are always exchange-traded. 1 Mohammad Mahdi Hajian, Ph.D candidate of Private Law, Department of Law, Tarbiat Modares University, Tehran, Iran. Email: m.hajian@modares.ac.ir 2 Dr. Mohammad Issaei Tafreshi, Associate Professor of Private Law, Department of Law, Tarbiat Modares University, Tehran, Iran. Email: tafreshi@modares.ac.ir