Bloomberg reports that Yale University yesterday named Robert C. Post — an expert in constitutional law who’s been teaching at Yale since 2003 — as the law school’s new dean. He’s expected to start in July.

As Dave reported yesterday, nearly four months after President Obama nominated Koh, who faced some stiff Republican opposition, Sen. Harry Reid (D-Nev.) filed cloture and moved his nomination to the floor for a vote.

The appointments of Dawn Johnsen, nominated to head the same Office of Legal Counsel that produced those memos (and who’s been strongly critical of the office’s work in the past), and of Harold Hongju Koh, the illustrious Dean of Yale Law School who has been tapped for State Department legal counsel, hang in the balance. Both have already been publicly attacked by conservatives as extreme leftists for, in Johnsen’s case, criticizing the torture memos and supporting the right to an abortion, and in Koh’s, for being a strong advocate of international law. (Dahlia Lithwick at Slate recently catalogued some of the more absurd attacks in her own defense of Koh.)

Horton wrote of the current political struggle:

“Senate Republicans are now privately threatening to derail the confirmation of key Obama administration nominees for top legal positions by linking the votes to suppressing critical torture memos from the Bush era. A reliable Justice Department source advises me that Senate Republicans are planning to “go nuclear” over the nominations of Dawn Johnsen as chief of the Office of Legal Counsel in the Department of Justice and Yale Law School Dean Harold Koh as State Department legal counsel if the torture documents are made public. The source says these threats are the principal reason for the Obama administration’s abrupt pullback last week from a commitment to release some of the documents. A Republican Senate source confirms the strategy. It now appears that Republicans are seeking an Obama commitment to safeguard the Bush administration’s darkest secrets in exchange for letting these nominations go forward.”

Koh, as Spencer has written, is a former Clinton administration State Department official who actually cares about human rights: at Alberto Gonzales’ confirmation hearing to become attorney general in 2005, he testified that the infamous August 2002 Office of Legal Counsel memo authorizing torture was “perhaps the most clearly erroneous legal opinion that I have ever read” and a “stain on our national reputation.” Of course, Jack Goldsmith, the former Bush administration OLC official, has also attacked those opinions as “deeply flawed” and “sloppily reasoned,” so Koh is hardly alone.

But Koh — who is the author or co-author of eight books and more than 150 articles on international human rights, business, national security and international law, among other things — has on occasion also boldly expressed his strong respect for international human rights law, which doesn’t go over very well with many conservatives.

In an article published in the Berkeley Journal of International Law in 2004, for example, which FOX News cites, Koh asked: “What role can transnational legal process play in affecting the behavior of several nations whose disobedience with international law has attracted global attention after September 11th — most prominently, North Korea, Iraq and our own country, the United States of America? For shorthand purposes, I will call these countries ‘the axis of disobedience.’”

Putting the United States in the same axis as North Korea and Iraq has, not surprisingly, outraged critics who, like the Bush administration, don’t believe the U.S. ought to be reined in by international legal standards.

Steven Gross, a fellow at the conservative Heritage Foundation, told FOX News that he worries that Koh “cares as much about — if not more about — international law and integrating that into the American judicial system than he does about protecting American prerogatives and American sovereignty.”

And John Fonte, senior fellow and director of the Center for American Common Culture at the Hudson Institute, said Koh’s views amount to “international imperialism. Under Koh’s plan, the Constitution would become secondary and international law would take precedence regardless of what Americans said about the matter.”

The White House vehemently defended Koh’s nomination on Tuesday, telling FOX News that he is “one of the most respected members of the legal community.”

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