Professor Tony Smith was born in Christchurch, New Zealand in 1947. He completed his LLB and LLM at Canterbury University, interspersed with a short-lived sortie into legal work with the Treasury. It was during these formative years that he acquired the deep interest in criminal law and its social and constitutional ramifications that has underpinned his whole career, and which gained him numerous academic advances, culminating in his chair of Criminal and Public Law at Cambridge University in 1996. He is currently Professor of Law at Victoria University, Wellington. This article is written by Lesley Dingle and is based on her interviews with Professor Smith which have been incorporated into the Eminent Scholars Archive at Cambridge.