Harold Koh

Harold Hongju Koh, Sterling Professor of International Law at Yale Law School, is a leading expert in public and private international law, national security law, and human rights. He first began teaching at Yale Law School in 1985 and served as its fifteenth Dean from 2004 until 2009. He has served in four presidential administrations during the last five decades. In 2021, he served as Senior Advisor, the senior political appointee, in the State Department Office of the Legal Adviser, where he had previously served from 2009 to 2013 as State Department Legal Adviser, service for which he received the Secretary of State's Distinguished Service Award. From 1998 to 2001, he served as U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for Democracy, Human Rights and Labor, and from 1983-85, he served as an Attorney-Adviser for the Office of Legal Counsel, U.S. Department of Justice.

Professor Koh has received 18 honorary degrees and more than 30 human rights awards, including the 2024 Robert A. Katzmann Award for Academic Excellence and awards from Columbia and Duke Law Schools and the American Bar Association International Law Section for his lifetime achievements in international law. He has authored or co-authored ten books, including most recently The Trump Administration and International Law (Oxford rev. ed. 2027) and The National Security Constitution in the 21st Century (Yale 2024); he has published more than 275 articles. He has testified regularly before Congress, and litigated numerous cases involving international law issues in both U.S. and international tribunals, including his current representation of Ukraine against Russia before the International Court of Justice and the Permanent Court of Arbitration. He is a Fellow of the American Philosophical Society and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a member of the Council of the American Law Institute, where he serves as co-Chair of the Restatement (Fourth) of the Foreign Relations Law of the United States.. He is an Honorary Fellow of Magdalen College, Oxford, has given dozens of named lectures, and served as visiting professor at several universities, including NYU, Cambridge, Oxford, the European University Institute, Columbia, Stanford, and the University of Toronto.

A Korean-American and native of New Haven, Professor Koh 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. Before coming to Yale, he 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, and worked as an attorney in private practice in Washington, D.C.