Steve Koh

Biography

Steven Arrigg Koh teaches and writes in criminal law, foreign relations law, international law, and constitutional law. His interdisciplinary scholarship bridges theory and practice, drawing on sociological frameworks to deepen institutionally grounded analyses of U.S. federal and international legal systems. His research has appeared or is forthcoming in New York University Law Review, Cornell Law Review, Washington University Law Review, Boston University Law Review, Minnesota Law Review, and Fordham Law Review, as well as in peer-reviewed social science journals such as the Annual Review of Law and Social Science and Cultural Sociology.  His commentary appears in Just Security and Lawfare, and has been selected for the Michigan Law School Junior Scholars Conference.

Professor Koh is a fellow at the Center for Cultural Sociology at Yale University and was the 2025 winner of Boston University School of Law’s Michael Melton Award for Excellence in Teaching. Previously, he served as the Marianne D. Short and Ray Skowyra Sesquicentennial Assistant Professor of Law at Boston College Law School, where he was a winner of the Innovation in Pedagogy Award, and as a fellow at Columbia Law School.

His scholarship is informed by a unique combination of high-level legal practice at both U.S. federal criminal and international criminal legal institutions. As a Trial Attorney in the Criminal Division of the U.S. Department of Justice in Washington, D.C., he worked on transnational criminal matters and served as Counsel to the Deputy Assistant Attorney General and Counselor for International Affairs. During this time, he also taught International and Transnational Criminal Law as an Adjunct Professor at Georgetown University Law Center. He also held positions at two major international criminal courts in The Hague: as a Visiting Professional in the Presidency of the International Criminal Court and as an Associate Legal Officer at the U.N. International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, where he served in Chambers on Prosecutor v. Radovan Karadžić, one of the landmark trials in the Tribunal’s history. Additional international experiences include service as a Visiting Scholar at Seoul National University in South Korea; study at the Cornell Summer Institute in International & Comparative Law at Université Paris I Panthéon-Sorbonne; representation of the Robert F. Kennedy Center for Human Rights before the OAS Inter-American Commission on Human Rights; and human rights research on a mission to Colombia co-sponsored by Senator Edward M. Kennedy. He has also been a Senior Fellow and Interim Attorney-Editor at the American Society of International Law in Washington, D.C., and a law clerk for the Honorable Carolyn Dineen King of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit.

Professor Koh is a Ph.D. candidate in Sociology at Yale University and earned his J.D. from Cornell Law School, where he served as Senior Article Editor of the Cornell Law Review. In 2019, Cornell awarded him the Law School Alumni Exemplary Public Service Award for “commitment to the highest standards of public service.” He earned an A.B. degree cum laude from Harvard College and an M.Phil. degree in Social and Developmental Psychology from the University of Cambridge, England; he has also completed coursework in Songwriting at Berklee College of Music. He speaks conversational Spanish; has studied French, Arabic, and Korean; and is currently a member of the bar in New York, Massachusetts, and Washington, D.C.