Harold Hongju Koh

Harold Hongju Koh, Dean and Gerard C. and Bernice Latrobe Smith Professor of International Law at Yale Law School, served in the US State Department from 1998 to 2001 as Assistant Secretary of State for Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor. He has published eight (authored and co-authored) books and numerous articles on international law, foreign relations, and constitutional law. His The National Security Constitution: Sharing Power After the Iran-Contra Affair (Yale University Press, 1990) won the American Political Science Association's award as the best book on the American Presidency in 1991. He is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical Society, and has been a Fellow of the Guggenheim Foundation and the Century Foundation. He served on the Council of the American Law Institute, the Board of Overseers of Harvard University, the Board of Directors of the the American Arbitration Association, the National Democratic Institute and Human Rights First, and the Board of Trustees of the Brookings Institution. He has been recognized with the 2005 American Bar Association's Louis B. Sohn Award and Columbia Law School's 2003 Wolfgang Friedmann Award for his outstanding lifetime contributions to international law and has received 10 honorary degrees, two law school medals, and more than 25 awards for his human rights work, which includes the representation of Haitian and Cuban refugees before the US Supreme Court.