As I have mentioned in my previous two posts, my plea to my fellow Adam Smith scholars is simple: stop citing the “Lectures on Jurisprudence” without proper qualification or a disclaimer. Even if those lecture notes were totally accurate — i.e. even if they were to contain a word-for-word transcription of Smith’s law lectures from the early 1760s — it is likely that the Scottish philosopher may have refined — or perhaps even repudiated — the ideas in those lecture notes.

Why do I say this? Because Smith was working on a separate book on a “theory of jurisprudence” for over 30 years — a major intellectual project that no doubt must have sprung from his aforementioned law lectures while he was still a professor at the University of Glasgow — but at the same time, he decided against its publication. Even as late as the 6th and last edition of The Theory of Moral Sentiments (published in 1790), Smith himself refers to this third great work (emphasis added by me):

“In the last paragraph of the first Edition of the present work [published in 1759], I said, that I should in another discourse endeavour to give an account of the general principles of law and government, and of the different revolutions which they had undergone in the different ages and periods of society; not only in what concerns justice, but in what concerns police, revenue, and arms, and whatever else is the object of law. In the Enquiry concerning the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, I have partly executed this promise; at least so far as concerns police, revenue, and arms. What remains, the theory of jurisprudence, which I have long projected, I have hitherto been hindered from executing, by the same occupations which had till now prevented me from revising the present work. Though my very advanced age leaves me, I acknowledge, very little expectation of ever being able to execute this great work to my own satisfaction; yet, as I have not altogether abandoned the design, and as I wish still to continue under the obligation of doing what I can, I have allowed the paragraph to remain as it was published more than thirty years ago, when I entertained no doubt of being able to execute every thing which it announced.”

Although we don’t know for sure, it is natural to assume that Smith’s “Lectures on Jurisprudence” (LJ) was the original source material of this third great book he was working on for so many years, his book on jurisprudence. Alas, the manuscript of this work not only remained incomplete when Smith died in July of 1790; Smith also specifically instructed his literary executors — the chemist Joseph Black and the geologist James Hutton, both of whom are pictured below — to destroy it, and they carried out Smith’s dying wish just days before his demise! (See, for example, page 434 of John Rae’s Life of Adam Smith, available here.)

Smith’s desire to keep his unfinished book on jurisprudence from seeing the light of day thus raises an intriguing possibility: that his decision to destroy his manuscript was, in fact, Smith’s last word about his theory of jurisprudence. In other words, Smith had his unfinished book thrown into his literary bonfire not because his work was incomplete or unfinished but because his views had changed or because he had nothing more to say on this subject, i.e. beyond what he had already written in Book V of The Wealth of Nations. If either of these conjectures is correct, why are we still citing LJ? That said, I will nevertheless identify two narrow circumstances, by way of exception, in which citing LJ would be justified.