prior probability

Adam Smith is mostly known as a political economist (The Wealth of Nations) or a moral philosopher (Theory of Moral Sentiments), but did you know that he was also a legal scholar? In fact, Smith was awarded a Doctorate of Law by the University of Glasgow in October of 1762, and he had lectured about law and jurisprudence during the 1762-63 academic year. (Update: Smith’s “Lectures on Jurisprudence” are available here, via AdamSmithWorks. Hat tip: Inverted Logic.)

Although Smith himself promised to write a book about the law, he never completed that work. To help fill this gap, my colleague and friend Robin Paul Malloy, a law professor at Syracuse University, recently published a book on “Law and the Invisible Hand” (the cover of which is pictured below), which explores the legal side of Adam Smith’s thought. I got to see Professor Malloy present his work at this weekend’s History of Economics Society, and I will be reviewing it here soon.

I will be presenting my most recent work on Adam Smith (see here) at the annual meeting of the History of Economics Society, which is taking place at the University of St Thomas in downtown Minneapolis. Updates from the conference to be posted here soon.

See here. (Hat tip: Brian Leiter.) Update (6/16): If you are unfamiliar with this ugly and time-wasting legal monster, check out Judge Richard Posner’s review of The Bluebook. (Also, appendix 2 on pp. 854-857 of this scathing review contains Posner’s own simple and common-sense citation rules.)

Postscripts: I have developed my own set of simple citation rules for law and legal studies, which I call “Antiblue“; in addition, here are my previous posts about the hideous Bluebook.

Did you know that on this day (June 14) in 2002 the planet Earth almost collided with a near-Earth asteroid known as “2002 MN“. The asteriod missed us by a mere 75,000 miles (121,000 km), only about one-third of the distance between the Earth and the Moon.

Among other things, on this day (June 13) in 1774, Rhode Island became the first of Britain’s North American colonies to ban the importation of slaves, and on this day in 1525, Martin Luther, the rebel priest who ignited the Protestant Reformation when he nailed his Ninety-five Theses on the door of the All Saints’ Church in Wittenberg, Germany, married Katharina von Bora. (Pictured below are three portraits of von Bora.)