Henry E. Smith earned an A.B. in German at Harvard and a Ph.D. in Linguistics at Stanford before beginning his J.D. at Yale, where he was an Articles Editor of the Yale Law Journal.

After graduating, Smith clerked for the Hon. Ralph K. Winter of the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit during 1996-97.

Smith then joined the faculty at Northwestern University School of Law, teaching Contracts, Federal Income Taxation, Property, Contract Theory, and Theories of Property.

In 2002 he returned to Yale Law School as a Professor of Law, and since Fall 2006, as the Fred A. Johnston Professor of Property and Environmental Law, teaching in the areas of property, intellectual property, natural resources, and taxation. Smith was a Scholar-in-Residence at the University of Virginia School of Law in 1999 and has also been a visiting professor at the University of Chicago Law School (Fall 2000) and Harvard Law School (Spring 2006).

In 2003 he was awarded a Berlin Prize Fellowship by the American Academy in Berlin. He has written primarily on the law and economics of property and his publications include "Self-Help and the Nature of Property," 1 Journal of Law, Economics & Policy 69 (2005); "Property and Property Rules," New York University Law Review 1719 (2004); "Exclusion and Property Rules in the Law of Nuisance," 90 Virginia Law Review 965 (2004); "The Language of Property: Form, Context, and Audience," 55 Stanford Law Review 1105 (2003); "Exclusion versus Governance: Two Strategies for Delineating Property Rights," 31 Journal of Legal Studies S453 (2002); "Optimal Standardization in the Law of Property: The Numerus Clausus Principle," 110 Yale Law Journal 1 (2000) (with Thomas W. Merrill); "Semicommon Property Rights and Scattering in the Open Fields," 29 Journal of Legal Studies 131 (2000). As a linguist, he is the author of Restrictiveness in Case Theory (Cambridge University Press, 1996).