Abstract
This paper examines the persistent effects of Crown- versus settler- colonialism through the lens of legal institutions. Exploiting a spatial regression discontinuity along colonial court boundaries in Mexico, I show that regions where the colonial state possessed greater legal capacity relative to settler elites experienced significantly higher levels of both historical and contemporary economic prosperity. Evidence from colonial court records, analyzed using natural language processing, indicates that judges in these regions more frequently constrained settlers’ attempts to dispossess indigenous communities. These legal constraints limited land inequality over the long-run, facilitating labor reallocation out of agriculture and the provision of public goods.