Henry Smith
Director, Project on the Foundations of Private Law
Department: Harvard Law School
Colleges / Universities: Harvard University
Contact
Hauser 320
Cambridge, MA 02138
Email: hesmith@law.harvard.edu
Website: Harvard faculty profile
Henry E. Smith is a Professor of Law at the Harvard Law School. In the recent past, he has also served in that capacity at Northwestern University and Yale Law School. Professor Smith's research interests include Intellectual Property, Natural Resources, Property, and Taxation. His recent publications include Communityand Custom in Property: 10 Theoretical Inquiries in Law and Property: Principles and Policies (with Thomas W. Merrill).
Degrees
A.B. German, Harvard University, 1986
A.M. German, Stanford University, 1987
Ph.D. Linguistics, Stanford University, 1992
J.D. Yale Law School, 1996
Recent Academic Article Summaries
How Not to Invent a Patent Crisis
This chapter assesses recent changes to the patent system and proposes reforms.
Proposed changes to the patent system that give officials more discretion are likely to fail; a few simple changes will reform the system without causing uncertainty.
Information Costs in Property, Intellectual Property, and Organizations
This paper looks at how intellectual property and physical property law help people solve complex problems.
Innovation is a complex problem, and patent, copyright, and other property rules help solve this problem.
Intellectual Property as Property: Delineating Entitlements in Information
This paper develops and applies an information cost framework for comparing IP and the law of tangible property.
Like the law of tangible property, copyright and patent law rely to some extent on modular boundaries to manage the complexity of coordinating activities surrounding markets involving information. Because uses of inventions tend to be more costly to evaluate patent law inclines towards more owner control than odes copyright.
Blog Posts
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