Lasting Legal Legacies: Early English Legal Ideas and Later Caselaw Development During the Industrial Revolution

Abstract We 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.