Professor Smith centers his research on constitutional law, American political thought, and modern legal and political theory, with special interests in questions of citizenship, race, ethnicity and gender. He was elected as an American Academy of Arts and Sciences Fellow in 2004, a Fellow of the American Academy of Political and Social Science in 2011, and a Member of the American Philosophical Society in 2016. Professor Smith was voted President-Elect of the American Political Science Association for 2017-2018.
Political Peoplehood: The Roles of Values, Interests and Identities, University of Chicago Press, 2015.
Still a House Divided: Race & Politics in Obama's America, (with Desmond S. King), Princeton University Press, 2011.
“Political Science and the Public Sphere in the 21st Century,” Social Science Research Council Essay Series, posted September 1, 2011.
“Equality and Differentiated Citizenship: A Modern Democratic Dilemma in Tocquevillian Perspective,” in The Anxieties of Democracy, ed. Ira Katznelson and Partha Chatterjee (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2012).
“Living in a Promiseland? Mexican Immigration and American Obligations” and “Reply to Barvosa, Alarcón, and DeSipio,” Perspectives on Politics 9:545-557, 571-573 (2011).
“Challenging History: Barack Obama and American Racial Politics,” with Desmond S. King and Philip A. Klinkner. Daedalus 140: 1-15 (2011).
“The Constitutionality of 'Attrition through Enforcement,'” Scotusblog, (July 13, 2011).
"Oligarchies in America? Reflections on Tocqueville's Fears," Journal of Classical Sociology 10: 189-200 (2010).
"From a Shining City on a Hill to a Great Metropolis on a Plain? American Stories of Immigration and Peoplehood," Social Research 77: 21-44 (2010).
"Differentiated Citizenship and the Tasks of Reconstructing the Commercial Republic," Journal of Social Philosophy 41: 214-222 (2010).
"Constitutional Democracies, Coercion, and Obligations to Include," in The Limits of Constitutional Democracy, ed. Jeffrey Tulis and Stephen Macedo (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010), 280-296.
"Understanding the Symbiosis of American Rights and American Racism," in America's Liberal Tradition Reconsidered: The Contested Legacy of Louis Hartz, ed. Mark Hulliung (Lawrence, KS: University of Kansas Press, 2010), 55-89.
"The Strangers in Ourselves: The Rights of Suspect Citizens in the Age of Terrorism," in Law and the Stranger, eds. Austin Sarat, Lawrence Douglas, and Martha Merrill Umphrey (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2010), 65-95.