This book could not be written in North Korea by a North Korean without the cruelest consequences falling on that person’s head. Here in the United States, as an American law professor, I can do so with drastically minimal risk by comparison. Yet I realize that I have this opportunity because of decisions by my forbears, not initially by me. If my parents’ families fled North rather than South during the Korean War, I could have found myself living in North Korea. Instead, I was born in Seoul, South Korea. Fulfilling a dream since my dad’s youth, my parents flew over the Pacific to the United States before I reached two years of age. Another reason that it would not be hard to imagine an alternate destiny of living in North Korea instead is because my paternal great-grandfather served as Governor of Pyongyang Province within a unified Korea. Governor Yoo’s son, my dad’s late father, died when my dad was very young. My grandmother remarried with grandfather Tan, the father of my aunts and uncles on my paternal side. My mother’s side has the most common Korean last name: Kim (like “Smith” in the United States). This particular branch of Kims (Gwang-Sahn Kim) historically served as scholars in the King’s court. I came to know this slice of family history as a college student, which is when I became more aware of the suffering of the North Korean people during the famine of the mid-1990s. This knowledge moved me deeply, provoking me to write a personal statement regarding wanting to make a difference for the people of North Korea in my application to Northwestern University School of Law, my law school alma mater. After serving as a founding professor of the first American JD program in Asian history, I embarked on researching and writing about North Korea as a Visiting Scholar and then a Senior Research Fellow at the University of Texas Law School, delving deeply into its extensive library collections and making ample use of inter-library loan. This book comes after over a decade of such research and writing: it attempts to continue fulfilling the words of my personal statement applying to Northwestern.