Law, self-interest, and the Smithian conscience
This essay examines how law understands and engages with self-interest. After examining the turn to voluntarism and away from a jurisdiction of conscience in recent law and legal theory, it moves attention to intellectual history, and examines the work of Adam Smith in ethics, economics and jurispru...
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Hart Publishing
2016
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| Summary: | This essay examines how law understands and engages with self-interest. After examining the turn to voluntarism and away from a jurisdiction of conscience in recent law and legal theory, it moves attention to intellectual history, and examines the work of Adam Smith in ethics, economics and jurisprudence, where a theory of conscience based on sympathy is used to explain self-interest and to provide the ground of an original ethical system. Evidence is then adduced that lawyers in Chancery in the decades immediately following Smith’s theorising came to think in similar terms, perhaps directly influenced by Smith’s arguments. |
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