Read all about him here.
From “Global Kohordinates” by Andy McCarthy:
Pres. George W. Bush ordered a robust government-wide response to the 9/11 attacks, and did so fortified by an authorization for the use of military force approved overwhelmingly by the American people’s elected representatives in both houses of Congress. U.S. military and intelligence forces, together with a coalition of allies, conducted combat operations that devastated al-Qaeda’s capabilities, killing and capturing thousands of enemy operatives. The National Security Agency monitored international enemy communications, including those crossing U.S. borders, to thwart further coordination between al-Qaeda’s overseas leaders and terrorists in the United States. The Justice Department, using enhanced national-security investigative powers enacted by a virtually unanimous Congress, rooted out terror cells in several successful prosecutions.
The strategy has kept the American people safe from a reprise of 9/11 for eight years. But it was all wrong, argues Harold Hongju Koh, the Yale Law School dean whom Pres. Barack Obama has nominated for the critical position of legal adviser to the State Department. “On the day after the attack,” Koh wrote in 2003, “George Bush could have flown to New York to stand in solidarity with the world’s ambassadors in front of the United Nations.” In reality, the U.N. building and its habitués were not available for a photo-op at the time, owing to the inferno a bit farther downtown. But reality is not Koh’s usual stomping ground.
He prefers the transnational-progressive vision of a post-sovereign order in which terror networks and rogue states are to be controlled by the luminous power of the law. Not American law, or even international law, but global law, first conceived by progressive academics (for instance, Harold Koh), then applied, and supposedly enforced, by supra-national tribunals. Faced with a terrorist atrocity, Koh argues, President Bush should have forgone all that national-defense mobilization and “supported the International Criminal Court as a way of bringing the Osama bin Ladens and Saddam Husseins of the world to justice.”
Koh is a radical transnationalist. Transnationalist is not a term of abuse; it is the term Koh himself uses to distinguish his worldview from that underpinning traditional American jurisprudence — the jurisprudence of national sovereignty. Koh does not see the United States as an independent nation with a natural right to security — the right to “preserve herself from all injury,” in the words of Emmerich de Vattel, the Swiss international-law pioneer admired by the Framers. He instead advocates a “transnational jurisprudence” that “assumes America’s political and economic interdependence with other nations operating within the international legal system.”
Koh’s support of a global legal system is the key to anticipating where he would try to take the country. As Ethics and Public Policy Center president M. Edward Whelan III observes in a spellbinding series on National Review Online’s “Bench Memos,” Koh “would be advising on the legal positions that the United States should be taking in federal courts on issues arguably implicating international law. . . . He would be counseling State Department officials on international negotiations, treaty interpretation, and treaty implementation; and he would be a major player in interagency disputes on all these matters.” If confirmed, Koh would be a powerful voice for those who seek to use global human-rights law to control relations not only between sovereign states, but between citizens and their governments. Koh would be enormously influential in an administration that is multilateralist in its instincts, eager to be admired in Europe, fixated on “engagement” (even with our enemies), and inclined to govern with a poorly camouflaged loathing of American power (at least when used to pursue American interests).
More here.