Photo: Kenneth C. Zirkel via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0). The Sterling Law Building.
Two recent graduates of Yale Law School, Sarah Donilon and Carter Squires, are co-authors of a new law review article proposing that states compensate civilians harmed by their own military operations. The article, "War Hazards Compensation for Civilians," was written with Professor Oona Hathaway and published in the UC Davis Law Review; Yale featured it on 22 June 2026. Our congratulations to both.
The proposal
The article argues that states should offer compensation to any civilian harmed by their military operations, not only where the harm was unlawful, but also for the lawful "collateral damage" of war. The authors model their scheme on a real one: a United States war-hazards compensation program, dating to the Second World War, that has for some eighty years covered civilian contractors injured or killed by the hazards of war. Extending that logic to war-affected civilians, they write, would do two things at once. "By providing such compensation to any civilian harmed by their military operations, states can offer some measure of solace and support." It would also, they argue, make the often-invisible human cost of war visible, and so make the true price of war plain.
The student angle
For a law student, co-authoring a law review article, and doing it alongside one of the field's leading scholars, is a rare and serious credential. Professor Hathaway is Yale's Gerard C. and Bernice Latrobe Smith Professor of International Law, director of the school's Center for Global Legal Challenges, and president-elect of the American Society of International Law. Donilon and Squires, both members of Yale Law's Class of 2026, were her co-authors on the piece, not research assistants but named authors of a published proposal that enters an active debate in the international law of armed conflict.
Why it matters
How states account for the civilian toll of their wars is one of the harder questions in international law, and it is not going away. A concrete, workable compensation mechanism, built on a program that already exists, is the kind of proposal that can move a debate from principle to policy. That two new graduates helped write it is a reminder that serious legal scholarship is not the exclusive preserve of the tenured.
For Yale law students
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Sources
This report is based on the announcement published by Yale Law School. The quoted passage is drawn from the authors' article as published there.
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