Harold Hongju Koh is the 15th Dean of Yale Law School and Gerard C. and Bernice Latrobe Smith Professor of International Law. On March 23, 2009, President Barack Obama nominated Dean Koh to be Legal Adviser to the United States Department of State.
Upon confirmation by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Koh said in an e-mail message to the Law School community that he will resign from his deanship and take a public service leave. As legal adviser, Koh will serve as principal counselor on all legal matters to Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton LAW ’73.
“There is no institution I love more than the Yale Law School. I have had the privilege of teaching here since 1985, and serving as your Dean since 2004,” Koh said in the e-mail message.
Contact Information: Yale Law School, P.O. Box 208215. New Haven, CT 06520. Contact Via Email
A Korean-American native of Boston, he holds a B.A. degree from Harvard College and B.A. and M.A. degrees from Oxford University, where he was a Marshall Scholar. He earned his J.D. from Harvard Law School, where he was Developments Editor of the Harvard Law Review, and served as a law clerk for Justice Harry A. Blackmun of the United States Supreme Court and Judge Malcolm Richard Wilkey of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit.
He and has held a variety of positions in private practice, government service, and academia, including at the Hague Academy of International Law. He is the brother of former Massachusetts Public Health Commissioner and United States Assistant Secretary for Health Nominee Howard Kyongju Koh.
In the 1980's Koh worked as an adviser to the Office of Legal Counsel in the Reagan Justice Department.
He began teaching at Yale Law School in 1985 and has served since 2004 as its fifteenth Dean. From 1998 to 2001, he served as U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for Democracy, Human Rights and Labor, and previously had served on the Secretary of State's Advisory Committee on Public International Law. Before joining Yale, he practiced law at Covington and Burling from 1982-83 and at the Office of Legal Counsel at the Department of Justice from 1983-85.
He was nominated by President Clinton to become Assistant Secretary of State for Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor on September 10, 1998 and confirmed by the Senate on October 21, 1998.
Dean Koh is a expert on public and private international law, national security law, and human rights. He has argued before the United States Supreme Court and he has testified before the U.S. Congress more than twenty times. He has been awarded eleven honorary doctorates and three law school medals and has received more than thirty awards for his human rights work. He is recipient of the 2005 Louis B. Sohn Award from the American Bar Association International Law Section and the 2003 Wolfgang Friedmann Award from Columbia Law School for his lifetime achievements in International Law.
He is author or co-author of eight books, including Transnational Litigation in United States Courts, Foundations of International Law and Politics (with O. Hathaway); Transnational Legal Problems (with H. Steiner and D. Vagts), Transnational Business Problems (with D. Vagts and W. Dodge), and The National Security Constitution, which won the American Political Science Association's award in 1991 as the best book on the American Presidency. He was also the editor of The Justice Harry A. Blackmun Oral History Project (1994-95).
He has published more than 150 articles on international human rights, international business transactions, national security and foreign affairs law, international trade, international organizations, international law and political science, and procedure.
He is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical Society, an Honorary Fellow of Magdalen College, Oxford, a former Visiting Fellow at All Souls College, Oxford, and a member of the Council of the American Law Institute. He has held fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the Century Foundation.
He has sat on the Board of Overseers of Harvard University and sits on the Boards of Directors of the Brookings Institution, Human Rights First, the American Arbitration Association, and the National Democratic Institute. He has been named one of America's “45 Leading Public Sector Lawyers Under The Age of 45” by American Lawyer magazine and one of the “100 Most Influential Asian-Americans of the 1990s” by A magazine.
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