Law & Economics
Portrait of Henry E. Smith
Scholar portraitSource: Harvard Law School

Smith

Henry E. Smith

Private-law theorist of property, information costs, and modularity

property lawinformation costsprivate law

Official Source Note

Harvard Law School identifies Smith as Fessenden Professor of Law and Director of the Project on the Foundations of Private Law. The institutional profile highlights his work on property and the information-cost structure of legal relations.

Smith is included because his exclusion, governance, and modularity framework explains why property law often uses standardized, thing-based forms instead of specifying every bilateral legal relation.

Source: Harvard Law School

Relevance to the Archive

Smith supplies an information-cost account of why property uses standardized forms and boundaries while retaining more tailored governance rules for recurrent conflicts.

Representative Contributions

  • Property and Property Rules (with Thomas W. Merrill, 2001)
  • The Oxford Introductions to U.S. Law: Property (with Thomas W. Merrill, 2010)
  • Property as the Law of Things (2012)

Works Included Here