We examine the determinants of individual liberty and state effectiveness in industrializing Britain, analyzing both outcomes jointly within a unified empirical framework. Drawing on 67,453 reports of cases heard in the English law courts between 1765 and 1865, we use large language models (LLMs) to construct case-level measures of judicial orientation toward individual liberty and state effectiveness. We then relate these measures to war, partisan control of government, their interaction, and salient case characteristics. Both wartime conditions and Tory governments—and especially their conjunction—shift legal emphasis toward state effectiveness and away from individual liberty. Strikingly, neither common-law nor de jure judicial independence systematically promotes individual liberty, contrary to conventional views of the two pillars of English legal institutions. Appeals from India lead to an elevated emphasis on individual liberty, unlike cases involving the state as a litigant or other cases originating outside Britain. Methodologically, our analysis demonstrates the power of LLMs to extract nuanced institutional data from historical corpora.

The effects of print censorship on early modern England's cultural production have yet to be examined quantitatively. Doing so requires distilling dispersed qualitative information into numerical data. An annual index of print censorship is constructed by eliciting the historical knowledge encoded in a large language model (LLM) primed with evidence from secondary sources. Application of a machine-learning (ML) algorithm to a major corpus provides document-level measures of cultural innovativeness (quality) and volume (quantity). Pre-existing topic-model estimates apportion each document among distinct cultural themes—three affected by censorship and five unaffected. This yields a yearly theme-level panel for 1525–1700. Local projections estimate censorship's dynamic effects. Counterintuitively, censorship increases innovativeness in censorship-affected themes relative to non-affected themes. Censorship has a temporary chilling effect on the quantity of cultural production though output recovers within a decade. Results are robust to an instrumental-variable approach addressing the endogeneity of censorship. Findings are unchanged when the censorship index is constructed using three alternative LLMs. Leveraging LLMs and ML to measure hard-to-quantify phenomena, such as censorship and cultural production, illuminates the drivers of cultural evolution.

Most modernization or development theories that incorporate law emphasize a growth in the scope of individual choice as law becomes impartial, relevant to all. An early expression of this conceptualization was Henry Maine's (1822-1888) celebrated dictum that progressive societies move from status to contract. We conduct an inquiry into Maine's conjecture using machine-learning applied to two early-modern English corpora, on caselaw and print culture. We train word embeddings on each corpus and produce time series of emphases on contract, status, and contract versus status. Only caselaw exhibits an increasing emphasis on contract versus status, and even that trend is discernible only before the Civil War. Thus, our findings indicate that development theories emphasizing the widening of individual choice do not characterize England in the century prior to the Industrial Revolution. After 1660, caselaw trends reflect the increasing importance of equity compared to common-law, with equity increasingly emphasizing status. This effect is particularly evident in family and inheritance law. In print culture, religion consistently emphasizes contract over status while politics exhibits a downward-trending emphasis on contract versus status. VAR estimates reveal that ideas in caselaw and print culture coevolved.

Authoritarian leaders frequently send mixed messages about law. While official rhetoric typically emphasizes obeying law, leaders have proven willing to sidestep the law when it proves inconvenient. We explore the impact of this duality on the attitudes of Russian citizens, drawing on three rounds of the Russian Longitudinal Monitoring Survey. To identify the separate effects of cohort, age, and survey year, we use existing estimates of a function relating age to the predisposition to form new attitudes. Our results indicate that one factor driving Russians' attitudes on law-abiding is the strength of the Kremlin's messaging on the importance of obeying the law especially in their formative years. This effect would have been strongest for the oldest Russians. Yet, ceteris paribus, more years lived in Russia lead to declines in law-abiding attitudes. The net result of these two effects is that older Russians profess greater law abidingness. Putin's emphasis on obeying the laws on the books has left its mark in the increasing prevalence of law-abiding attitudes.

We combine unsupervised machine-learning and econometric methods to examine cultural change in 16th- and 17th-century England. A machine-learning digest synthesizes the content of 57,863 texts comprising 83 million words into 110 topics. The topics include the expected, such as Natural Philosophy, and the unexpected, such as Baconian Theology. Using the data generated via machine-learning we then study facets of England's cultural history. Timelines suggest that religious and political discourse gradually became more scholarly over time and economic topics more prominent. The epistemology associated with Bacon was present in theological debates already in the 16th century. Estimating a VAR, we explore the coevolution of ideas on religion, science, and institutions. Innovations in religious ideas induced strong responses in the other two domains. Revolutions did not spur debates on institutions nor did the founding of the Royal Society markedly elevate attention to science.

We generate and analyze data pertinent to examining whether developments in caselaw were consequential for England's economic performance during the Industrial Revolution. Applying topic modeling to a corpus of 67,455 reports on English court cases, we construct annual time series of caselaw developments between 1765 and 1865. We then add a real per-capita GDP series to our caselaw series and estimate a structural VAR featuring a linear time trend. Our evidence shows that caselaw developments were an important determinant of economic fluctuations. Caselaw shocks jointly account for more of the variability in per-capita GDP around its longterm trend than do shocks directly to per-capita GDP. The response of per-capita GDP to caselaw innovations critically depends on the legal domain. Developments in caselaw on intellectual property, organizations, debt and finance, and inheritance boosted economic performance while developments in property and ecclesiastical caselaw had negative effects on per-capita GDP. Our analysis uncovers a 'bleak-law era' when the legal system misallocated attention between outputpromoting and output-hindering areas of law.

Authoritarian leaders frequently send mixed messages about law. While official rhetoric typically emphasizes obeying law, leaders have proven willing to sidestep the law when it proves inconvenient. We explore the impact of this duality on the attitudes of Russian citizens, drawing on three rounds of the Russian Longitudinal Monitoring Survey. To identify the separate effects of cohort, age, and survey year, we use existing estimates of a function that relates age to the predisposition to form new attitudes. We find that Russians’ attitudes on law-abiding are driven by the strength of the Kremlin's messaging. This effect was strongest for the oldest Russians. Yet, ceteris paribus, more years lived in Russia lead to a decline in law-abiding attitudes. The net result of these two effects is that older Russians profess greater law abidingness. Putin's emphasis on obeying the laws on the books has left its mark in the increasing prevalence of law-abiding attitudes.

Revolutions are invariably viewed as the violent replacement of an existing political order. However, many social innovations that result in fundamental institutional and cultural shifts do not occur via force nor have clear beginning and ending dates. Focusing on early-modern England, we provide the first-ever quantitative inquiry into such quiet revolutions. Using existing topic model estimates that leverage caselaw and print-culture corpora, we construct annual time series of attention to 100 legal and 110 cultural ideas between the mid-sixteenth and mid-eighteenth centuries. We estimate the timing of structural breaks in these series. Quiet revolutions begin when there are concurrent upturns in attention to several related topics. Early-modern England featured several quiet, but profound, revolutionary episodes. The financial revolution began by 1660. The Protectorate saw a revolution in land law. A revolution in caselaw relating to families was underway by the early eighteenth century. Elizabethan times saw an increased emphasis on basic skills and showed signs of a Puritan revolution affecting both theology and ideas on institutions. In the decade before the Civil War, a quiet revolution of dissent preceded the turmoil that led to a king’s beheading.

To what extent are personal trust, mutual interests, and third parties important in enforcing agreements to trade? How do firms combine these to form transactional-governance structures? This article answers these questions in a whole-economy, cross-country setting that considers a full spectrum of transactional-governance strategies. The data collection requires a new survey question answerable in any context. The question is applied in six South American countries using representative samples, with the resultant survey weights facilitating a whole-economy analysis. Without imposing an a priori model, latent class analysis estimates meaningful governance structures. Bilateralism is always used. Law is never used alone. Bilateralism and formal institutions are rarely substitutes. Within country, inter-regional variation in governance is greater than inter-country variation. The usefulness of the data is shown by testing one element of Williamson's discriminating-alignment agenda: greater uncertainty in the transactional environment increases the involvement of third parties.

AbstractWe explore English legal evolution by empirically investigating the relevance of late-medieval and early-modern legal ideas for caselaw development during the Industrial Revolution, an era of unprecedented societal change. To ascertain the prevalence of specific legal ideas in pre-1765 case reports, we draw on existing topic model estimates. We measure the relevance of those ideas for subsequent caselaw development using post-1764 citations to the pre-1765 cases. We show that deliberations on court cases heard between 1765 and 1870 systematically invoked a broad range of preexisting legal ideas. Strikingly, the strongest effects are exhibited by Coke-style analysis and precedent-based thought. A key legacy of early English caselaw therefore lay in bestowing modes of reasoning. The reason why a subset of preexisting legal ideas does not exert a detectable effect is that those ideas were generally no longer key to post-1764 legal disputes. Our approach to investigating legal development could be applied in many other contexts.

We provide a quantitative macrohistory of the evolution and coevolution of three fundamental elements of English caselaw: property, contract, and procedure. Our dataset is derived from a comprehensive corpus of reports on early-modern English court cases. Leveraging existing topic-model estimates, we construct annual time series of attention to each of the three legal domains between the years 1552 and 1764 and estimate a structural VAR. Property and procedure are affected for decades by their own shocks. Procedure and property coevolve. In contrast, contract adjusts quickly to its own shocks and does not coevolve with the other two areas of caselaw. We identify the episodes and events outside the legal system that correspond to systemic shocks. Edward Coke was a shock to procedure. The commercial revolution raised attention to contract. The Glorious Revolution, interestingly, did not lead to elevated attention to property issues, but the Civil War and Interregnum did. The evolution of contract, while relatively autonomous from the internal dynamics of the legal system, was, of the three legal domains, least autonomous from society.

We argue that topic-modeling, an unsupervised machine-learning technique for analysis of large corpora, can be a powerful tool for legal-historical research. We provide a non-technical introduction to topic-modeling driven by the presentation of an example of how researchers can use the data that topic-modeling produces. The context of the example is pre-industrial English caselaw on finance. We generate new insights on the timing of pertinent legal developments, the linkages of law on finance to other areas of law, and the relative importance of common-law and equity in the emergence of law and legal ideas relevant to finance. We argue that topic-modeling has the potential to bridge traditional legal history and economics, increasing the influence of the former on the latter, which is overdue. The output of topic-modeling includes the data required to generate a quantitative macroscopic overview of the flow of legal history. These data can be used in many ways in subsequent legal-historical research. Epistemologically, topic-modeling offers an escape from the temptations of Whig history and opens up new avenues for inductive analysis characteristic of traditional historical research.

We examine how pre-Industrial-Revolution English caselaw development on land, inheritance, and families affected, and was affected by, economic and demographic outcomes. Our yearly measures of caselaw development are derived from existing topic-model estimates that reflect a comprehensive corpus of reports on pre-1765 court cases. We estimate a structural VAR model using these caselaw time-series in combination with measures of real per-capita income and vital rates. Pre-industrial caselaw development profoundly shaped economic development. Strikingly, the areas of caselaw that stimulated real-income growth are on families and inheritance, not land. Caselaw on families and inheritance was especially important as a driver of real income and birth rates after 1710. Caselaw developments were spurred primarily by changes in real income, not by changes in vital rates. Incorporation of endogenous caselaw development leaves intact the findings of the existing literature that examines pre-industrial economic-demographic interactions. However, our findings do imply that any Malthusian trap that was present in pre-industrial England was made less severe as a result of developments in caselaw on families and inheritance.

Conventional wisdom confers iconic status on the clause of England’s Act of Settlement (1701) mandating secure tenure for judges. This paper uses new databases of judges’ biographies and citations to estimate how the move to secure tenure affected the number of citations to judges’ decisions, a measure of the quality of decisions. Several strategies facilitate identification of the effect of secure tenure. A court-year panel permits use of a difference-in-differences framework. Controls capture judges’ human capital and amount of litigation. Historical evidence, tests of sensitivity to omitted-variable bias, and instrumental variables estimates support the findings on the effects of tenure arrangements derived from ordinary least squares estimates. Secure tenure had a strong deleterious effect on associate judges’ decisions and a smaller positive effect on chief judges’ decisions. The effect of all judges having secure tenure is negative, large, and statistically significant. The act had an effect opposite of that universally assumed. According to the plan of the convention, all judges who may be appointed by the United States are to hold their offices during good behavior…. The standard of good behavior for the continuance in office of the judicial magistracy, is certainly one of the most valuable of the modern improvements in the practice of government. (Hamilton [1788] 1981, pp. 226–27) In one sense you could say that Judge [Roy] Bean was independent. He did whatever he liked. (O’Connor 2009, p. 47) According to the plan of the convention, all judges who may be appointed by the United States are to hold their offices during good behavior…. The standard of good behavior for the continuance in office of the judicial magistracy, is certainly one of the most valuable of the modern improvements in the practice of government. (Hamilton [1788] 1981, pp. 226–27) In one sense you could say that Judge [Roy] Bean was independent. He did whatever he liked. (O’Connor 2009, p. 47)

The history of England's institutions has long informed research on comparative economic development. Yet to date, there exists no quantitative evidence on a core aspect of England's institutional evolution, that embodied in the accumulated decisions of English courts. Focusing on the two centuries before the Industrial Revolution, we generate and analyze the first quantitative estimates of the development of English caselaw and its associated legal ideas. We achieve this in two companion papers. In this, the first of the pair, we build a comprehensive corpus of 52,949 reports of cases heard in England's high courts before 1765. Estimating a 100-topic structural topic model, we name and interpret all topics, each of which reflects a distinctive aspect of English legal thought. We produce time series of the estimated topic prevalences. To interpret the topic timelines, we develop a tractable model of the evolution of legal-cultural ideas and their prominence in case reports. In the companion paper, we will illustrate with multiple applications the usefulness of the large amount of new information generated by our approach.

A characterization of the ideas of Francis Bacon and Edward Coke, two preeminent English lawyer-scholars, provides insights into the nature of the legal–intellectual culture of early seventeenth-century England. This emerging culture remains underexplored, even though it immediately preceded and provided essential input into the ‘culture of growth,' the eighteenth-century cultural paradigm viewed as a catalyst for England's historically unprecedented technological advance and economic growth. To develop insights, we employ a methodology not previously used in this context, applying structural topic modeling to a large corpus comprising the works of both Bacon and Coke. Estimated topics span legal, political, scientific, and methodological themes. Legal topics evidence an advanced structure of common-law thought, straddling ostensibly disparate areas of the law. Interconnections between topics reveal a distinctive approach to the pursuit of knowledge, embodying Bacon's epistemology and Coke's legal methodology. A key similarity between Bacon and Coke overshadows their differences: both sought to build reliable knowledge based on generalizing from particulars. The resulting methodological paradigm can be understood as reflecting a legacy of common-law thought and constituting a key contribution to the era's emerging legal–intellectual culture. More generally, our analysis illustrates how machine learning applied to primary texts can aid in exploration of culture.

Using a unique data set of Chinese foreign direct investment (FDI) contracts from the 1980s and early 1990s, we explore those mechanisms of historical persistence resulting from China's unique colonial experience. Adopting difference-in-differences as well as difference-in-difference-in-differences analysis within conditional logit, we provide evidence that foreign investors favored locating FDI in Chinese cities in which their home country had a colony in the 19th century and that a human-capital channel best explains this persistent impact of colonial experience. While alternative explanations for long-term persistence are not consistent with the empirical findings, the results suggest that legal human capital inherited from colonial times affected economic decisions after 1978. Thus, we attempt to advance the literature on history's long-lasting influence by proposing one particular mechanism of persistence memory of legal institutions, or inheritance of legal human capital.