Oona A. Hathaway

Oona A. Hathaway is an American legal scholar specializing in international law , national security law , and U.S. foreign relations law . She serves as the Gerard C. and Bernice Latrobe Smith Professor of International Law at Yale Law School , where she is also director of the Center for Global Legal Challenges, and as a professor of political science at Yale University .

Hathaway earned a B.A. summa cum laude from Harvard University in 1994 and a J.D. from Yale Law School in 1997, during which she was editor-in-chief of the Yale Law Journal . She clerked for Justice Sandra Day O’Connor of the U.S. Supreme Court and Judge Patricia M. Wald of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit before joining the Yale faculty. From 2014 to 2015, she took leave to serve as Special Counsel to the General Counsel for National Security Law at the U.S. Department of Defense, earning the Office of the Secretary of Defense Award for Excellence; she has also been a member of the U.S. Department of State’s Advisory Committee on International Law since 2005.

Hathaway is co-author, with Scott J. Shapiro, of The Internationalists: How a Radical Plan to Outlaw War Remade the World (2017), which analyzes the 1928 Kellogg-Briand Pact’s role in transforming norms against the use of force in international relations and was named a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice and one of The Economist ’s Books of the Year. She has authored or co-authored over 40 law review articles on topics including the enforcement of international law and the law of armed conflict, and serves as executive editor of the online forum Just Security . In April 2025, she was elected president-elect of the American Society of International Law.

Oona A. Hathaway was born in 1972 and raised in Portland, Oregon , in a family with transnational ties that exposed her to European history and cross-border dynamics from an early age. Her mother, a native of the Netherlands , recounted personal memories of the Nazi occupation during World War II and the subsequent liberation by American forces, experiences that highlighted the human costs of conflict and the role of international intervention.

The family's annual visits to her mother's large extended relatives in the Netherlands , typically involving train journeys across Europe , immersed Hathaway in diverse cultural environments during her childhood. These trips, which sometimes extended to other countries, cultivated an early appreciation for global interconnectedness and the practical challenges of international movement. Hathaway has attributed her initial curiosity about international affairs to such exposures, which emphasized forging links beyond national boundaries rather than isolated domestic perspectives.

Limited public details exist on her father's background or siblings beyond references to a brother in personal anecdotes, with no documented direct familial professions in law or policy shaping her path. Portland's Pacific Northwest setting, with its relative proximity to Asia-Pacific trade routes and post-Vietnam War reflections in the 1970s and 1980s , provided a regional context of evolving U.S. foreign policy debates, though Hathaway has not explicitly linked local factors to her formative interests.

Oona A. Hathaway received her B.A. in Government summa cum laude from Harvard University in 1994, an achievement that included the Thomas Temple Hoopes Prize for outstanding senior thesis research. This undergraduate training provided foundational exposure to political theory, comparative government, and international relations , disciplines central to her later specialization in international law .

Hathaway then pursued legal education at Yale Law School , earning her J.D. in 1997. During her time there, she served as Editor-in-Chief of the Yale Law Journal , a position that involved overseeing scholarly publications on legal topics, including those intersecting with international and constitutional law .