N.B.: I will resume my series on “Kurt Gödel and the Leibniz Conspiracy” in my next post.

Building on my previous blog posts on this subject (see here, here, here, and here), I have just posted this short paper to SSRN. To the point, my plea to my fellow Adam Smith scholars is to stop citing the Scottish philosopher’s Lectures on Jurisprudence without proper qualification. Although this compilation of lecture notes purports to be a primary source–a transcription of Smith’s law lectures at the University of Glasgow–these student notes pose two practical problems. One is that we have no idea how faithful or accurate this transcription of Smith’s law lectures is. The other problem is that Smith himself may have repudiated the ideas contained in those early law lectures.