David Hume and Adam Smith on Law and Justice

Andreas Rahmatian presents the first comprehensive study of the legal aspects of Hume’s and Smith’s writings. The Scottish Enlightenment was considerably legal or jurisprudential in its moral and social or political philosophy. Yet until now, David Hume and Adam Smith’s considerable body of legal texts – both with regard to technical (private) law and legal and political philosophy – have been neglected by lawyers and philosophers, political theorists and historians of political thought. By focusing on the legal aspects in relation to the works of Hume and Smith, this book connects Hume’s and Smith’s legal thought with their moral philosophy and shows the relevance of their moral philosophy to their legal writings. It completes the analysis of Hume’s and Smith’s moral philosophy by focusing on what they had to say about law, by comparing and contrasting these two thinkers and putting them into context with Scottish Enlightenment thought generally. Hume and Smith’s different views in relation to the origin of justice, of morality and of other foundational conceptions of the law are compared and contrasted and also considered in relation to other thinkers of the Scottish Enlightenment and beyond.

• Publication date: 30 November 2026
• Page count: 264
• Dimensions: Height 234 mm; Width 156 mm
• Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
• Format: Hardback
• ISBN-13: 9781399515191