Koh to be confirmed

Good news from last night: Dave Weigel of the Washington Independent reports that Democrats are moving for cloture on the nomination of Harold Koh, the dean of Yale Law School and a respected scholar, to become legal advisor to the State Department.

Back in April, FP featured an Argument piece by law professor Ronald Slye. It's an excellent primer on transnational law -- Koh's specialty, and the sticking point for Republicans opposing his nomination -- and a good look at the new State advisor.

All transnationalism does, in a nutshell, is work to describe and understand how law develops in a globalizing world. It is not prescriptive, purporting to say how international law and domestic law, or public and private law, should interact; nor does it attempt to answer whether the United States should adopt or reject a particular rule of international law. Instead, it challenges the descriptive power of international law's traditional dichotomies, between public and private, and domestic and foreign law. It recognizes that states are not the only actors in international law -- that organizations such as the United Nations, for instance, play a vital role. It also examines how international actors interpret, internalize, and enforce laws....

Ultimately, legal transnationalism, particularly as articulated by Koh, falls squarely within the mainstream. Koh himself is a moderate, having worked for both the Republican Reagan and Democratic Clinton administrations. Everyone from Laurence Tribe of Harvard Law School to Dean Kenneth Starr at Pepperdine University School of Law, as well as half the country's law school deans, supports him. This is not surprising. We are, of course, talking about the legal office that most directly engages with issues of international law. Why would we not want one of the foremost international law experts in the country in that position?