Oona Hathaway is the Gerard C. and Bernice Latrobe Smith Professor of International Law, and Founder and Director of the Center for Global Legal Challenges at Yale Law School. In 2025, she was named president-elect of the American Society of International Law, the leading international law organization in the United States. Since 2005, she has served on the Advisory Committee on International Law for the Legal Advisor of the US Department of State. In 2014-15, Hathaway served as Special Counsel to the General Counsel for National Security Law at the US Department of Defense, where she was awarded the Office of the Secretary of Defense Award for Excellence. Hathaway holds a BA in Government from Harvard College and a JD from Yale Law School, where she served as editor-in-chief of the Yale Law Journal. She clerked for US Court of Appeals DC Circuit Judge Patricia Wald and US Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor.
Hathaway is the co-author of two books: The Internationalists: How a Radical Plan to Outlaw War Remade the World (with Scott Shapiro, Simon & Shuster, 2017) and Foundations of International Law and Politics (with Harold H. Koh, Foundation Press, 2004). Together with Curtis Bradley and William Dodge, she leads the American Law Institute’s Restatement of the Law Fourth: The Foreign Relations Law of the United States. Her articles have appeared in the top law journals and in Foreign Affairs, the New York Times, and the Washington Post, among others. Hathaway is the founder and editor of JustSecurity.org, and a lifetime member of the Council on Foreign Relations. She has been a visiting fellow at the MaxPo Center on Coping with Instability in Market Societies at Sciences Po, Paris, and is a non-resident scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. In 2025, she was named a Guggenheim Fellow and elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
