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Professor Oona Hathaway Named President-Elect of the American Society of International Law

Oona Hathaway standing next to a sign from the 119th ASIL Annual Meeting
Professor Oona Hathaway at the annual meeting of the American Society of International Law.

Professor Oona Hathaway ’97 has been named president-elect of the American Society of International Law (ASIL), the Society announced during its annual meeting this month. Hathaway is the Gerard C. and Bernice Latrobe Smith Professor of International Law at Yale Law School.

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.

Hathaway also serves as a professor of international law and area studies at the Yale University MacMillan Center, professor of the Yale Department of Political Science, 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, and she was recently named a 2025-2026 Guggenheim Fellow.

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 fellow Yale Law School Professor Scott Shapiro ’90, “The Internationalists: How a Radical Plan to Outlaw War Remade the World.” She is also executive editor of Just Security, and she writes often for The Washington Post, The New York Times, and Foreign Affairs.