Harold Hongju Koh

About/Bio

Harold Hongju Koh is Sterling Professor of International Law at Yale Law School. He returned to Yale in January 2013 after serving for nearly four years as the 22nd Legal Adviser of the U.S. Department of State, for which he received the Secretary of State’s Distinguished Service Award. Professor Koh served as the fifteenth Dean of the Yale Law School from 2004 until 2009. From 1998 to 2001, he served as U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for Democracy, Human Rights and Labor. He has authored or co-authored eight books, published more than 180 articles, testified regularly before Congress, and litigated numerous cases involving international law issues in both U.S. and international tribunals. He holds B.A. and J.D. degrees from Harvard College and B.A. and M.A. degrees from Oxford University, where he was a Marshall Scholar. After graduating law school, he served as a law clerk for Judge Malcolm Richard Wilkey of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit and Justice Harry A. Blackmun of the United States Supreme Court, worked as an attorney in private practice in Washington, and served as an Attorney-Adviser for the Office of Legal Counsel, U.S. Department of Justice.

Recently Published

The Oxford Statement on International Law Protections Against Foreign Electoral Interference through Digital Means

Election insecurity constitutes a dangerous global threat. Thirteen prominent intelligence experts stated, in a brief filed in U.S. federal court, that: “Over the last several years, evidence has emerged that Moscow has launched an aggressive series of active measure campaigns to interfere in elections and destabilize politics in Montenegro, Ukraine, Moldova, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Estonia, Sweden,…

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The Second Oxford Statement on International Law Protections of the Healthcare Sector During COVID-19: Safeguarding Vaccine Research

The alarming spread of the global COVID-19 pandemic—now infecting nearly 19 million and claiming more than 700,000 lives worldwide—has made it increasingly urgent to define international law protections for the health care sector against malicious cyber operations. In May 2020, malicious cyberattacks on organizations at the frontline of the response to the COVID-19 pandemic—including the…

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Anthony P. Lester

When lawyers tell of the making of European law, they usually speak of statespersons like Jean Monnet, cases like van Gend & Loos and judges like Koen Lenaerts. But in that pantheon belongs one of the legal architects of the now-vibrant fields of European Union and Human Rights Law,…

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