 |
||
 |
|
|
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
The Yale Alumni Magazine is owned and operated by Yale Alumni Publications, Inc., a nonprofit corporation independent of Yale University. The content of the magazine and its website is the responsibility of the editors and does not necessarily reflect the views of Yale or its officers. |
|
Comment on this article Harold Koh, former assistant secretary of state. Dean of the top U.S. law school. And now, tool of radical Islam. A week after Koh's nomination as legal adviser to the State Department, that's the caricature emerging in the conservative media. And a Yalie is leading the charge. In a New York Post opinion piece headlined "Obama's Most Perilous Legal Pick," Meghan Clyne '03 dubs Koh a "radical" who believes that "the distinctions between U.S. and international law should vanish. . . . On issues ranging from affirmative action to the interrogation of terrorists, what the rest of the world says, goes. Including, apparently, the world of radical imams." The basis for that last claim: a 2007 e-mail in which New York lawyer Steven J. Stein contended that Koh had said—at a Yale Club dinner in Greenwich, Connecticut—that sharia, or Koranic law, could "in an appropriate instance . . . govern a controversy" in American courts. "Score one for America's enemies and hostile international bureaucrats, zero for American democracy," Clyne concluded. In a letter to the Post, Robin Reeves Zorthian '76, who organized the dinner as president of the Yale Alumni Association of Greenwich, called Stein's account "totally fictitious." In an interview with the Yale Alumni Magazine, Zorthian says she doesn't recall Koh's exact response to what she described as Stein's persistent "confrontational questions" about sharia. But "there were 45 of us sitting there. If the dean of the Yale Law School had said, 'Yes, I want to impose sharia law in the American courts,' we would remember." With all that Koh has written and said publicly over the years, she adds, "I think it would be highly unusual that he would have a super-secret agenda that he decided to reveal one night at the Yale Club of Greenwich." Nevertheless,
the blogosphere has turned Stein's accusation into a cause celebre. Jihad
Watch ran an
article called, "Obama Nominee Sees No 'Reason Why Sharia Law Would Not Be
Applied to Govern a Case in the United States.'" Amboy Times's title for its commentary: "Obama
Nominee Harold Koh Hearts Sharia." The headline on We the People: "Hussein Picks Shariah Law
Advocate." David Limbaugh (Rush's brother) quotes Koh's judgment that, in the post-9/11 world, the United States had joined an "axis of disobedience" where international law was concerned. Then Limbaugh concludes: Koh "believes America is always the bad guy." At another site, an anonymous poster offered this advice to "Koh the Kommie, ENEMY OF THE U.S. CONSTITUTION": "You want to live under the [International Criminal Court], haul your fat commie a** to the land of the Europukes." Distressed at these "gross distortions of Koh's views," Slate's Dahlia Lithwick '90 fired back in his defense. "Harold Koh is not a radical legal figure," she writes. Rather, he's a "fierce advocate" for the rule of law—including international law—who, in taking on the Bush administration's lawless behavior, was "willing to use strong words like torture and illegal long before most of us could bring ourselves to do so." Both sides see more at stake than just the question of who will provide legal advice to the State Department. "When moderate Americans and the mainstream media allow a handful of right-wing zealots to occupy the field in the public discussions of an Obama nominee, they become complicit in a character assassination," Lithwick avers. For Clyne, Koh's current nomination is a trial run for an
appointment to the U.S. Supreme Court. "Koh is a key test case in the
'judicial wars,'" she writes. "If he makes it through" this
confirmation process, "the message to the Obama team will be: You can pick
'em as radical as you like." Contrary to the implication of your article, one does not have to rely on hearsay from a talk in a Greenwich home to conclude that Professor Koh is a "radical" who believes that "the distinctions between U.S. and international law should vanish. . . ." One can simply rely on his published work in, among other places, the Yale Law Review. Here's a quote from the American Journal of International Law: "domestic courts must play a key role in coordinating U.S. domestic constitutional rules with rules of foreign and international law, not simply to promote American aims, but to advance the broader development of a well-functioning international judicial system." Professor Koh would subvert the Supremacy Clause of our constitution. His ideas represent a dangerous affront to the sovereignty of our citizens. Furthermore, any transnationalist legal framework is necessarily arbitrary, since judges would presumably apply only foreign laws which they deem worthy, while ignoring others. That is not a legal framework at all, but rather an excuse to impose by judicial fiat that which should properly be left to the legislative branch. It's one thing to have someone like Harold Koh as the dean of Yale Law School—I almost expect as much. It's much more troubling, however, to have him nominated to be the top legal expert at the State Department. Unfortunately, I don't think the American public really understands what's at stake.
|
||||||
|
|||
|