Professor Hathaway Named Order of the Coif Distinguished Visitor

Oona A. Hathaway ’97, the Gerard C. and Bernice Latrobe Smith Professor of International Law at Yale Law School, has been selected as the Order of the Coif Distinguished Visitor for 2023.

The Order of the Coif is an honorary scholastic society, which comprises 75 chapters at law schools across the United States. The society is dedicated to promoting excellence in legal education and recognizes legal scholars and jurists who have “attained high distinction” in their careers.

Each year, the Order of the Coif’s Distinguished Visitor Program brings one or more selected judges, academics, or practitioners to several law schools with established Coif chapters. The Distinguished Visitor spends two days at each institution, participating in classroom lectures and seminars, meeting informally with faculty and student groups, and giving one address open to the entire academic community.

As the 2023 Distinguished Visitor, Hathaway will travel to Northwestern Pritzker School of Law, Case Western Reserve University School of Law, and Emory University School of Law. She will deliver her first lecture on Feb. 21.

In addition to her professorship at Yale Law School, Hathaway is Professor of International Law and Area Studies at the Yale University MacMillan Center and Professor of Political Science at Yale University. She serves as Director of the Yale Law School Center for Global Legal Challenges, which she founded in 2011.

Hathaway has been a member of the Advisory Committee on International Law for the Legal Adviser at the United States Department of State since 2005. From 2014–15, she took leave to serve as Special Counsel to the General Counsel at the U.S. Department of Defense, where she was awarded the Office of the Secretary of Defense Award for Excellence. She is the Director of the annual Yale Cyber Leadership Forum and a member of the Council on Foreign Relations.

Hathaway has published more than forty law review articles, as well as The Internationalists: How a Radical Plan to Outlaw War Remade the World (with Charles F. Southmayd Professor of Law Scott Shapiro ’90, 2017). She is also Executive Editor of and regular author at Just Security, and she writes often for popular publications such as The Washington Post, The New York Times, The Atlantic, and Foreign Affairs.

The Order of the Coif has named a number of Yale Law School faculty members Distinguished Visitors since the program began in 2004. They include James Forman Jr. ’92, the J. Skelly Wright Professor of Law, in 2019; Abbe Gluck ’00, the Alfred M. Rankin Professor of Law, in 2018; Eugene Fidell, Visiting Lecturer in Law, in 2016; Tracey L. Meares, the Walton Hale Hamilton Professor of Law, in 2015; and Heather Gerken, Dean and Sol & Lillian Goldman Professor of Law, in 2012.