A widely recognized expert in commercial law, Henry Gabriel has spent the last three decades actively engaged in the development of domestic and international law. Appointed by successive administrations, for over twenty years he has been a United States Delegate to the United Nations Commission on International Trade Law. Elected by the sixty-four member states, he served four five-year terms on the Governing Council of UNIDROIT (International Institute for the Unification of Private Law) in Rome. For over thirty years he has been a Commissioner representing Louisiana and North Carolina with the National Conference of Commissioners on Uniform State Laws. He is now a Life Member of the Conference as well. The author of ten books and over eighty law review articles and book chapters, he has twice been a Distinguished Fulbright Professor, first at the Catholic University of Portugal and then at the University of Trento in Italy. He has been a Visiting Fellow at Harris Manchester College, Oxford University where he was affiliated with the Commercial Law Center and a Visiting Fellow at Wolfson College, Cambridge University where he was affiliated with the Center for Corporate and Commercial Law.

Closely involved with the Uniform Commercial Code, he is a member of the Permanent Editorial Board of the Uniform Commercial Code.  He was the reporter for the revisions of U.C.C. Article 2: Sales and Article 2A: Leases as well as the Chair of the committee to revise U.C.C. Article 7: Documents of Title. He recently served on the drafting committee for the new Article 12 of the Uniform Commercial Code. He also served on the drafting committee of the Uniform Electronic Transactions Act. 

He has also contributed extensively to the development of international commercial law. He was a member of the Working Group and Chair of the Editorial Committee for the 2010 UNIDROIT Principles of International Commercial Contracts, the Chair of the UNDROIT Guide to Contract Farming, and is currently Chairing the Working Group to draft the UNIDROIT Model Law on Factoring. He was a member of the United States Delegation for the drafting of the United Nations Convention on the Use of Electronic Communications in International Contracts and the UNCITRAL Model Law on Electronic Transferable Records. He was a United States Delegate to the Diplomatic Conference for the adoption of the Mining, Agricultural and Construction Protocol to the Cape Town Convention on International Interests in Mobile Equipment and is presently a member of the Preparatory Commission for this Convention.  He is co-chair of the Uniform Law Commission- American Bar Association International Joint Editorial Board.

He has taught international commercial law at the University of Trento in Italy, the Catholic University of Portugal, Kyushu University in Japan, the University of Lapland in Finland, and Victoria University, the University of Queensland, the University of Western Australia, Monash University, Murdoch University and Deakin University in Australia.  He has taught American law for several years at Jinan University, Renmin University and the University of International Business and Economics in China.

He is an Elected and Life Member of the American Law Institute and a Fellow of the European Law Institute. A former appellate litigator with the United States Department of Justice, he has been counsel in more than fifty federal appeals in the United States Supreme Court and the United States Courts of Appeal.