March 23 (Bloomberg) -- Yale Law School Dean Harold Hongju Koh will be nominated by President Barack Obama to be the State Department’s legal adviser, the White House press office said in a statement, marking another break from the Bush administration.

Koh, 54, a Marshall scholar who received his law degree from Harvard, has been dean at Yale since 2004. He served as assistant secretary of state for democracy, human rights and labor from 1998 to 2001 during the Clinton administration.

As the State Department’s legal adviser, he will provide counsel on international law to the secretary of state and embassies around the world. He will head an office of almost 200 lawyers, Yale Law School said in a statement on its Web site today.

The nomination is subject to Senate confirmation.

Koh was a hailed by his Yale colleague Akhil Amar, a constitutional lawyer and the Sterling professor of law and political science, for his “extraordinary” intellect and energy.

“He is the leading theorist of transnational and international law in America today,” said Amar, in a telephone interview today. “One of the biggest forces at work in the world is globalization and he has thought about that and written about that as well and as deeply as anyone.”

Since leaving government service, Koh has written articles critical of former President George W. Bush’s administration for its policies regarding the treatment of detainees and other legal issues.

‘Sickened’ By Opinion

In an article published last year in the Washington Monthly, Koh wrote that he was “sickened” by an August 2002 Justice Department opinion regarding the use of torture and called it a “disgrace” to the legal profession.

In testimony Sept. 16, 2008, to the Senate Judiciary Committee, Koh said the U.S. won “universal sympathy” as the victim of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

“Tragically, the current administration chose to respond with a series of unnecessary, self-inflicted wounds, which have gravely diminished our global standing and damaged our reputation for respecting the rule of law,” Koh said.

He cited the treatment of prisoners at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, the government’s eavesdropping without warrants and the denial of rights for detainees at the prison camp at the U.S. Naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, as part of “a sorry historical record,” according to a transcript of his remarks on the committee’s Web site.

Family History

Koh’s family settled in the U.S. after his father, the South Korean ambassador to the U.S., renounced his position after a military coup, Koh said in a 2003 interview at the University of California, Berkeley, that is posted on the Internet.

“My father refused to serve the dictatorship and spent the rest of his life in America,” he said during the interview. “So when I became assistant secretary of state for democracy of the United States and went back to Korea, it was an important way of bringing my whole family’s life full circle.”

Obama announced the nomination of Koh today, along with David H. Stevens to be assistant secretary for housing in the department of housing and urban affairs and Dr. Yvette Roubideaux to be director of Indian health service in the Department of Health and Human Services.

“The expertise that these talented individuals bring to their respective roles gives me confidence that they will be effective advocates for the American people in meeting the many challenges our nation faces,” Obama said in a statement released by the White House.

To contact the reporter on this story: Hans Nichols in Washington at hnichols2@bloomberg.net

Last Updated: March 23, 2009 20:13 EDT