All families may be created equal, so to speak. But differences between families in terms of economic wealth, resource networks, and access to cultural capital are both severe and stark. A large part of what shapes this scenery of economic possibility is the legal framework of wealth transfer....

We examine how pre-industrial 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...