Thus far, I have explained why scholars should be more cautious when citing Adam Smith’s “Lectures on Jurisprudence” (LJ). In summary, although LJ purports to be a primary source — a transcription of Smith’s law lectures at the University of Glasgow during the 1760s — these student lecture notes pose two problems. One is that we have no idea how faithful or accurate this transcription of Smith’s law lectures is (see here, for example). The other problem is that Smith himself may have repudiated the ideas contained in those early law lectures. After all, as I explained in my previous post, he was writing a book on jurisprudence, and he specifically chose not to publish that book. Today, however, I want to identify two narrow exceptions where citing LJ would be perfectly permissible: (1) to show whether Adam Smith’s ideas about “law and government” in Book V of The Wealth of Nations changed over time, and (2) to present a conjecture or guess as to the actual content or substance of Adam Smith’s theory of jurisprudence. I will further explore both of these exceptions and conclude this series in my next post.