Henry E. Smith ’96 to Join Yale Law School Faculty

Dean Cristina M. Rodríguez ’00 has announced that Henry E. Smith ’96 will join the Yale Law School faculty as Professor of Law on July 1, 2026. 

Smith is currently Fessenden Professor of Law at Harvard Law School where he has taught since 2009 and where he directs the Project on the Foundations of 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.

“Henry Smith is the most important property law scholar of his generation,” said Rodríguez. “Through his work, he has reoriented the field toward a focus on the internal logic and systemic nature of private law. Discussion of foundational ideas in property — from the numerus clausus to the problem of noninvasive nuisances — necessarily occur in terms he has helped define. His newest work on equity as a meta-law vital to our legal system promises to be equally pathbreaking.” 

Smith is the co-editor most recently of “Reinach and the Foundations of Private Law” (Cambridge, 2025) and “Interstitial Private Law (Oxford, 2024). Some of his important articles include “Property as the Law of Things,” “Introduction: Traditional Knowledge and Property in Moral Communities,” and “The Equity in Corporate Law,” with Andrew S. Gold. Since 2014, he has been the lead Reporter for the American Law Institute’s Restatement (Fourth) of Property.  

This appointment marks a return to the Yale Law School faculty, which Smith joined in 2002 before being named Fred A. Johnston Professor of Property and Environmental Law in 2006. While at the Law School he served on numerous faculty committees and taught courses including Property, Introduction to Intellectual Property, Patent Law, and Remedies. 

Smith is a graduate of Harvard College, Stanford University (Ph.D.), and Yale Law School. While a law student, he served as Articles Editor of the Yale Law Journal, a student director of the Jerome N. Frank Legal Services Organization, and received the Benjamin Scharps Prize for 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.