 Harold, you are the 13th Arthur Goodheart Visiting Professor of Legal Science to be interviewed for the Immolence Scholars Archive. You're currently the Sterling Professor of International Law at Yale Law School, a physician that you've held since 2013. You've been a Goodheart Professor for the academic year 2018-19 and we are very grateful for your agreeing to share some reminiscences of your life and career and your experiences here in Cambridge over this period. I hope you can also give us some thoughts on legal topics in international law. So could we start with your early life? You were born in Boston on December 8th 1954 and this was 16 months after the end of the Korean War. Your father was originally from what is North Korea but he escaped to the United States. Can you tell us a little about your parents, how they came to the States and re-established themselves there? Yeah, so actually it was my mother who was from North Korea. My parents are the inspiration of my life. My father is an international law professor which explains why I'm an international law professor. His name was Kwang Lim Ko and he was from a very small island off the south coast of South Korea. So he was as south as you could get. It's called Cheju Island. It's a fishing village and he was an incredibly hardworking student and was the first student from the island ever to go to Seoul which was an Astana. It would be like someone from the Isle of Wight coming to London. At the time the Seoul National University was controlled by the Japanese colonial forces and so what he attended was called Keijo Imperial University where he was the only Korean with one other fellow and they were very heavily discriminated against. But my father took this as a challenge and was number one in the class even though he was the only one of the only two Koreans and this created this incredible drive for achievement really to prove that Koreans could not be looked down upon. My mother who my dad passed away in 1989. He did not escape to America. He came as a student. In fact we just found the materials. He got a scholarship from an educational institution in Princeton, New Jersey which he misunderstood. This was in 1949. He misunderstood to me. He was being admitted to Princeton University to study law. Princeton doesn't have a law school. So he came all the way to America, went to Princeton and they said we don't have a law school. So he enrolled in a PhD program at nearby Rutgers University in New Jersey. Got a PhD. He then went to Harvard Law School, got a master's LLM and then got an SJD and then finally just to establish that he could practice law in America he got a JD degree from Boston College Law School and I'll say more about this in a moment but his specialty was Law of the Sea and particularly the study of fisheries. Next week I'm arguing at the International Court of Justice about, among other things, Russia's theft of fisheries from Ukraine. So it's coming full circle in some way. Finally I realized my father had a vision that was just very far-reaching. Now my mother, Haesung Chun-ko, is from a very different walk of life. She's from a very well-to-do family in Seoul. She is still alive. When I get back from Cambridge we'll have her 90th birthday. She gave birth to six children. She has her own PhD. She is the head of a research institute on Koreans and Korean Americans and she's a sociologist and my parents were the first Asians ever to teach law at Yale Law School where they did 1961 and my sister and I are now a chaired professor at Yale Law School many years later. But what happened was that my mother's family had a summer home in North Korea which is a very cool mountainous part of the country and when the country was divided by after the end of World War II they were having to be up there herself and her two siblings and was actually trapped inside North Korea for three or four months and the Russians were in control and she was recounting to me just very recently that when the Russians came marching down they didn't know what to do so they held up a sign you're supposed to welcome them. She didn't like the Russians so she put up a sign that said welcome allied forces and she was advised that she was 17 years old that the Russian forces were raping and molesting young Korean women so after several months she dressed up as a boy and she and her two brothers hiked to the border and my grandfather who I never met her father sent a car to meet them when they got to the border there was no car and then they just waited there for 10 hours or something and suddenly a car appeared and took her south. Amazingly a few months later she went to America on a scholarship to Dickinson College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. As a freshman the Korean War started and Dickinson College is very close to the Army War College and they sent a kind of distress signal saying does anyone speak Korean because our generals need to know how to speak Korean so my mother went over there as a freshman 18 years old and started teaching them Korean language and then a few weeks later she said to them you know you can't learn Korean language without learning Korean history and you can't learn Korean history without learning Korean culture and so I want to teach these courses and you can't do it any of it without knowing Korean geography so she taught all of these courses as a fresher so she is a remarkable person as you can tell and so my parents were among the only two Koreans in the east coast under the Japanese I'm sorry under the the Korean Normalization Act they figure less than a thousand in the mainland of America as opposed to Hawaii and then by incredible coincidence the my father's dissertation advisor at Rutgers went to Dickinson where my mother was a student to give a speech and my mother was his tour guide and so he went back and told my father there's this remarkable Korean woman at not so far from here so my father began writing her letters and proposing marriage and things like this sight unseen and and eventually she agreed to a meeting and then they got married in the I'm the fourth child of six and what an incredible trajectory well I think there are a couple things you can get from that one is I'm an optimistic person I think by by my history you know it's it's a miraculous story really in fact I'll tell a little bit more if it's not too much the pivotal moment of my father's career came in he was at Harvard Law School and Singh Munri's government which was sort of an American being propped up by the Americans collapsed and my father's friend John Chung was the ambassador from Korea to Washington wanted to run for prime minister and my father was so popular in the south of Korea that Chung asked my father to go back and campaign for him but my father didn't have any money and but he had just joined the church at Harvard Law School right it's right next to Harvard Law School and so the minister of the church said to my parents okay on Sunday we'll tell you to leave the church and just take your family and walk out so he did and a few minutes later he came on gave us several thousand dollars he had he had just called for the congregation to donate money so that this young patriot could go back to Korea so my father goes back they win the election and he suddenly was offered every position he was sort of the young star of the government he then agreed to be the first ambassador to the UN but and he was only 40 years old the Korea was an observer nation so then they said we would like you to be the number two guy in Washington the Sharjah the fairs and this was the ideal position of my father the year was 1960 John Kennedy had just been elected and my father was constantly over at the White House and everybody at the White House was somebody new from Harvard and he was having the time of his life and then and we were living in Washington DC the whole family one day he my mother gets a call and my father's at Dulles Airport and he says to her what I was worried about is happening I'm going back to Korea and it turned out he had been warned that the Korean government would be overthrown by a military tatership and so he flew back and warned Chang his mentor and boss and Chang said no no General Park Park Chung he will prevent this from happening a few days later General Park himself committed the coup and they were all thrown out by this point my father was back in America and he convened the meeting of everybody at the embassy and he said everyone must take a pledge we will never serve a dictatorship we will only serve a democracy that's governed by the rule of law and everybody signed the pledge and within a year everybody broke the pledge except for my father and he was exiled and he never served in the government again but he told me the story countless times and his main point was that many people profess to care about the rule of law but it's it's really kind of a but they're weak-willed and when push comes to shove they don't live their commitments then the other amazing thing this happens and then I'll end this little account is that my father heard that Chang his boss would be executed and was under house arrest so he went to the White House to see the deputy national security advisor who was a man named Walt W. Rostow famous economist and Rostow said to him we know where Mr. Chang is he will not be harmed and my father was just staggered by the reach of American power that this guy sitting in Washington could say this with certainty about something happening on the other side of the world and then when it was over and also I think he was stunned by what he thought was the goodness of American power and obviously America's powers had many faces but this gave my father a deep love of America which I think everybody in my family shares that there's a good America and then there's a not so good America but we have to keep calling America to its better angels at the very end of the conversation almost proving this what Rostow says to my father what are you doing now and my father says I'm I'm exiled and I'm unemployed and I have six children and Rostow says don't don't you teach law and my father says yes and he says well you know my brother is dean of the law school Eugene Rostow let me call him so he picks up the phone and they have a very short conversation according to my father the conversation lasted maybe 10 seconds and he couldn't hear what he said and my father just assumes that nothing had happened so he was getting ready to leave and then Rostow said where are you going and my father said I guess it didn't work out he said no no no he said my brother said can you get here in a week and a week later we moved to New Haven 40 years later I was dean of the law school so so from these strands come a couple things you know first I think this belief in human rights that we have to fight for human rights second that we have to be committed to the rule of law third that we have to call America American citizens have to call America to its better angels and finally that you know there's a generous approach to life and a less generous approach to life and you know if you're lucky enough to be the beneficiary then you have to take that generous approach to others and so I've tried to live by those ideas not imperfectly but that's been the case now there's a very interesting connection to good heart which is when I was growing up in New Haven Connecticut my dad wanted my brother to get into a local boy's school and it turned out the only way you could get in was to be recommended by someone who had gone to that school and there was a guy a young professor Guido Calabrese and my father went to him and asked him would you recommend my son's my brother to the school which he did and then he recommended each of us and that's how he went years later I was Guido's colleague and then succeeded him as the dean of the law school but it was Guido who said to me the best year I ever had was my year at Cambridge as the good heart professor at Trinity Hall and that's when it sort of came into my mind gee I'd like to be the good heart professor someday and my other colleague John Langbine also had a similar experience at Trinity Hall so um anyway that's how I that's how I got here thank you very much