The aim of this book is threefold: firstly to argue that Adam Smith developed a number of suggestions from David Hume into a new and original answer to the perennial philosophical question of how legal criticism is possible; secondly, to show how the answer was the basis for Smith's system of natural jurisprudence and as such the core of his political thought; and thirdly, to give a systematic account of Smith's natural jurisprudence.

There seem to have been two obvious avenues open to Hume after he had rejected the existing ‘foundation-theories’ of morality and law, according to which moral and legal evaluation had an ultimate and validating source in either the reasoning faculty or a moral sense: he could find an alternative ‘foundation’, or he could shift the problem away from the question of foundations altogether. It may be tempting to understand him in terms of the former strategy, especially in his theory of justice, if one interprets it on proto-utilitarian lines. There are, however, great difficulties in this, as we shall see, partly because of the meaning he gives the term ‘utility’, and partly because this interpretation would lead directly to the kind of legal positivism which he strongly criticizes. The suggestion to be pursued here, therefore, is that he somehow changes the problem. He does not do so by completely rejecting all talk of foundations, for he puts forward his well-known emotivist theory of the origin of evaluation.