File under: Not April Fools!

As a follow-up to my previous post, there are at least two reasons why scholars of Adam Smith should be more cautious when citing the so-called “Lectures on Jurisprudence” (LJ). To begin with, those student lecture notes from the early 1760s are not even Adam Smith’s. They were transcribed by one or more of Smith’s students and discovered over 100 years later, so we have no way of knowing just how faithful or accurate those student notes are.

To mention just one egregious example, the second set of Smithian law lecture notes are dated 1766 (see here, here, or here, for instance), even though Adam Smith himself was in Paris for most of 1766, not delivering law lectures at the University of Glasgow. In fact, he had stopped lecturing at the end of 1763 and had formally resigned his Glasgow professorship for good in February of 1764.

The other reason why Adam Smith scholars should avoid citing LJ is even more significant. Like his lectures on natural religion, Smith’s law lectures may not represent the Scottish philosopher’s own ideas at all. I will explain why in my next post.