Adam Smith as Jurist

Adam Smith is world-famous as a founding father of economics, yet his work as a jurist is much less well known. He worked for decades on a book that would have spanned the ground between his moral philosophy and the empirical sociology and economics of Wealth of Nations, but never completed it, and on his deathbed he asked his executors to destroy his manuscripts. However, two of his Glasgow students kept detailed notes of his lectures there between 1762 and 1764, and using these notes, Professor Iain McLean, Senior Research Fellow in Politics at Nuffield College, Oxford, will lay out the principles of Smith’s jurisprudence and try to show Smith’s half-submerged influence on the new republic of the United States, in whose revolution he took great interest.