Professor Oona A. Hathaway ’97, the Gerard C. and Bernice Latrobe Smith Professor of International Law, has been named a Berlin Prize recipient for the 2025–26 academic year.
The Berlin Prize is awarded by the American Academy in Berlin to roughly 20 fellows every year. The Prize offers recipients the time and resources to advance their scholarly and artistic work. Fellows are hosted at the Hans Arnhold Center in Berlin and work with German colleagues and audiences at lectures, readings, discussions, concerts, and film screenings, according to the Academy.
Hathaway will use the fellowship to write her book, “War Unbound,” which examines how a fundamental shift in the nature of war has strained international humanitarian law. Her project examines how war has shifted from conflicts between states to more frequent confrontations between states and nonstate actors. In the years since 9/11, a series of wars — from the U.S.-led “war on terror” to the Syrian civil war, Russia’s war in Ukraine, and the Israel-Hamas war in Gaza — have each led to the deaths of tens of thousands of civilians. Hathaway’s book project explores whether the international commitment to containing war through law can be revived given how international humanitarian law has been stressed by these violent conflicts.
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 examines 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 2025–26 Guggenheim Fellow and the president-elect of the American Society of International Law (ASIL).
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 writes often for The Washington Post, The New York Times, and Foreign Affairs.
The American Academy at Berlin was founded in September 1994 and has since advanced the work of more than 600 fellows and distinguished visitors who work in the arts, humanities, social sciences, and public policy.
https://law.yale.edu/yls-today/news/professor-hathaway-awarded-berlin-prize-fellowship