English Poor Law Cases, 1690-1815

This dataset of historical poor law cases was created as part of a project aiming to assess the implications of the introduction of Artificial Intelligence (AI) into legal systems in Japan and the United Kingdom. The project was jointly funded by the UK’s Economic and Social Research Council, part of UKRI, and the Japanese Society and Technology Agency (JST), and involved collaboration between Cambridge University (the Centre for Business Research, Department of Computer Science and Faculty of Law) and Hitotsubashi University, Tokyo (the Graduate Schools of Law and Business Administration). As part of the project, a dataset of historic poor law cases was created to facilitate the analysis of legal texts using natural language processing methods. The dataset contains judgments of cases which have been annotated to facilitate computational analysis. Specifically, they make it possible to see how legal terms have evolved over time in the area of disputes over the law governing settlement by hiring.