67,453 court cases from industrializing Britain show that common law did almost nothing to protect individual liberty.
Historical narratives often claim that the English legal system and independent judges were the primary defenders of personal freedom. This analysis of tens of thousands of records proves that neither of these pillars systematically pushed back against state power. Courts were far more concerned with maintaining order and property rights than with shielding individuals from government overreach. Most people believe that our current freedoms grew out of this specific legal tradition. The data suggests that liberty was won through political struggle rather than through the wisdom of the courts.
Liberty and State Effectiveness in Industrializing Britain: War, Politics, and Law
SSRN · 6731001
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 s