Study title

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.A World Economic Forum meeting at Davos 2019 heralded the dawn of 'Society 5.0' in Japan. Its goal: creating a 'human-centred society that balances economic advancement with the resolution of social problems by a system that highly integrates cyberspace and physical space.' Using Artificial Intelligence (AI), robotics and data, 'Society 5.0' proposes to '...enable the provision of only those products and services that are needed to the people that need them at the time they are needed, thereby optimizing the entire social and organizational system.' The Japanese government accepts that realising this vision 'will not be without its difficulties,' but intends 'to face them head-on with the aim of being the first in the world as a country facing challenging issues to present a model future society.' The UK government is similarly committed to investing in AI and likewise views the AI as central to engineering a more profitable economy and prosperous society. This vision is,...