Harold Hongju Koh (born December 8, 1954) is an American lawyer and legal scholar who served as the legal adviser of the Department of State in the Obama administration. He was nominated to this position by President Barack Obama on March 23, 2009, and confirmed by the Senate on June 25, 2009. He left the State Department in January 2013, returning to Yale University as a Sterling Professor of international law. He was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 2007. Early life and family Koh was born in Boston, Massachusetts. His parents grew up in Korea under Japanese rule in an area that later became part of North Korea. He has described his family thus: They grew up under Japanese colonial rule, forbidden to speak Korean or even to use their Korean names. When their country was divided after World War II, my mother and her family were trapped in North Korea. In desperation, they hiked for days to the border to be picked up and were brought back to Seoul. But even there, they lived under dictatorship. For less than a year in the 1960s, (South) Korea enjoyed democracy. My father joined the diplomatic corps. But one day, tanks rolled and a coup d'etat toppled the government, leaving us to grow up in America. After the coup, Koh's father, legal scholar and diplomat Kwang Lim Koh, was granted asylum in the United States. He moved to New Haven, Connecticut, with his family and took a teaching position at Yale. His wife, Hesung Chun Koh (Harold Koh's mother), had a Ph.D. in sociology and taught at Yale as well—they were the first Asian Americans to teach there. Harold was struck by polio at age six; he went through "two operations, leg braces, and endless rehabilitation" and as a result still walks with a limp. Koh has six siblings. Howard Koh—a Harvard University public health professor and former Massachusetts Public Health Commissioner—previously served as the United States Assistant Secretary for Health in the Obama administration. His sister Jean Koh Peters also teaches at Yale Law School. Koh's wife, Mary-Christy Fisher, is an attorney employed by the Connecticut Veterans Legal Center; they have two children. Education Koh graduated in 1971 from the Hopkins School in New Haven; graduated summa cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa from Harvard in 1975 with a degree in Government, before studying at Oxford University as a