Henry E. Smith

Henry E. Smith is a professor of law at Yale Law School and co-director of the Center for Private Law. His teaching and scholarship focus on the law and economics of property, intellectual property, equity, restitution, and remedies, with a focus on how property-related institutions lower information costs and constrain strategic behavior.

Smith is most recently a co-editor of “Reinach and the Foundations of Private Law” (Cambridge, 2025) and “Interstitial Private Law (Oxford, 2024). Some of his articles include “Equity as Meta-Law,” “Putting the Equity Back in Intellectual Property Remedies,” and “Property as the Law of Things.” He is co-author of “Property: Principles and Policies” (fourth ed., Foundation, 2022), “Principles of Patent Law: Cases and Materials” (eighth ed., Foundation, 2024), and “A Safety-Valve Model of Equity as Anti-Opportunism” (Cambridge, 2023).

Prior to his appointment at Yale Law School, Smith was Fessenden Professor of Law at Harvard Law School where he taught since 2009 and where he directed the Project on the Foundations of Private Law. From 1997 to 2002, Smith was an assistant, associate, and full professor of law at the Northwestern University School of Law and was a member of the Yale Law School faculty from 2002 until 2009. In 2006, he was named Fred A. Johnston Professor of Property and Environmental Law at Yale. 

Smith is a graduate of Harvard College, Stanford University (Ph.D., linguistics), and Yale Law School. While a law student, he served as an articles editor of the Yale Law Journal, was a student director of the Jerome N. Frank Legal Services Organization, and received the Benjamin Scharps Prize for the best paper by a third-year student. Following law school, he clerked for the Hon. Ralph K. Winter ’60 of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit.

Smith has served as the president of the Society for Institutional and Organizational Economics and since 2014 is the reporter for the American Law Institute’s Fourth Restatement of Property.