Professor Oona Hathaway Named President of the American Society of International Law
At its annual meeting this month, Gerard C. and Bernice Latrobe Smith Professor of International Law Oona Hathaway ’97 assumed the presidency of the American Society of International Law (ASIL).
“I will not pretend this is an ordinary moment to be taking on this role,” Hathaway said in her keynote address at the annual meeting. “We gather at a time when international law is under strain in ways we have not seen in generations. The foundational principles of the international order, the institutions we built to enforce them, the courts we entrusted to judge them — all are being tested, from many directions at once. Long-settled commitments are being discarded. Norms that seemed beyond question a decade ago are being debated again. The postwar international legal order can no longer be taken for granted.”
Hathaway’s expertise as an international law scholar has been sought after in the media, especially in recent months. She has contributed op-eds or been cited in The New York Times, NPR, TIME, and interviewed by The Atlantic, The New Yorker, and other major media outlets on issues including actions in Venezuela and the war in Iran.
“International law has never mattered more than it does right now,” Hathaway said in her remarks.
ASIL was founded as a nonprofit, nonpartisan, educational membership organization in 1906. Chartered by Congress in 1950, its mission is to “foster the study of international law and to promote the establishment and maintenance of international relations on the basis of law and justice.”
Today, ASIL is the premier international law organization in the United States, with some 4,000 members from over 100 countries, including attorneys, academics, corporate counsel, judges, government and NGO representatives, international civil servants, and students. ASIL advances international law scholarship and education for legal professionals as well as for broader policymaking and public audiences through its events, publications, and research initiatives.
“We are a society of people who know that international law has never stood still — and that its hardest moments have often been its most generative,” Hathaway said at the ASIL annual meeting. “The United Nations, the Nuremberg principles, the Geneva Conventions — none of them existed before the crises that made them necessary. Every generation has added to the law, and ours will, too. This is a moment for thinking big about what the law can be and what we can do to make the future better than the past.”
In addition to her faculty position at the Law School, Hathaway serves as a professor of the Yale Department of Political Science, member of the faculty at the Yale Jackson School of Global Affairs, and director of the Yale Law School Center for Global Legal Challenges.
Hathaway’s current research focuses on the future of the global legal order, accountability for the Russia-Ukraine war, the possibilities for reform at the United Nations, reviving international humanitarian law, and sovereignty in cyber operations. Her research also focuses on foreign relations topics, including U.S. war powers and the law governing how the United States makes its international agreements. She is a Reporter for the Restatement (Fourth) of Foreign Relations Law, was named a 2025-2026 Guggenheim Fellow, and is executive editor of Just Security.
Hathaway has been a member of the Advisory Committee on International Law for the Legal Adviser at the U.S. Department of State since 2005. She also served as special counsel to the general counsel at the Defense Department in 2014–15, where she was awarded the Office of the Secretary of Defense Award for Excellence. She is a nonresident scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and a member of the Council on Foreign Relations.
Her publications include more than 50 law review articles and a book co-authored with Yale Law School Professor Scott Shapiro ’90, “The Internationalists: How a Radical Plan to Outlaw War Remade the World.”
