Individual Liberty and State Effectiveness in Industrializing Britain: The Role of War, Politics, and Law

Peter Grajzl, Washington and Lee University
Peter Murrell, University of Maryland

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.

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 Presented in Session 1. Law, Authority, and Administrative Rationalization