Harold Hongju Koh is Dean and Gerard C. and Bernice Latrobe Smith Professor of International Law at Yale Law School, which he has led since 2004.

From 1998 to 2001, Dean Koh served as assistant secretary of state for democracy, human rights and labor. A graduate of Harvard College, Oxford University (where he was a Marshall Scholar) and Harvard Law School, he went on to serve as law clerk to Judge Malcolm Richard Wilkey of the DC Circuit, and Justice Harry A. Blackmun of the US Supreme Court. Before going to Yale in 1985, he practiced law at Covington and Burling and at the Office of Legal Counsel at the Department of Justice.

Dean Koh has written more than 80 articles and authored or co-authored eight books, including Transnational Legal Problems (with H. Steiner & D. Vagts) and The National Security Constitution, which won the American Political Science Association's award as the best book on the American Presidency. Dean Koh has been awarded nine honorary doctorates and two law school medals and has received more than 25 awards for his human rights work. He has been named by American Lawyer magazine as one of America's 45 leading public sector lawyers under the age of 45, and by A Magazine as one of the 100 most influential Asian-Americans of the 1990s.

This lecture series is named in honor of Valerie Gordon '93, an activist for human rights internationally, domestically and locally. Valerie passed away shortly after graduation, and this event commemorates the remarkable contributions she made in her short life.

A pizza lunch will be served.