Law where enforcement is the hard part — treaties, sovereignty, international courts, and rights asserted against states.
10 topics · 10 curated works
No prior grounding assumed.
Universal Declaration of Human Rights
United Nations General Assembly · 1948
Sets out, in a single instrument adopted by the community of nations, the civil, political, economic, social and cultural rights held to belong to…
Assumes you know the vocabulary.
Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees
United Nations · 1951
Defines who counts as a refugee and binds signatory states not to return a refugee to a country where their life or freedom would be threatened,…
Primary sources and full treatments.
Mare Liberum
Hugo Grotius · 1609
Argues the open sea cannot be subject to any nation's sovereignty or ownership because it is inexhaustible and cannot be occupied, founding the…
+7 more at this level
10 works
United Nations General Assembly
Sets out, in a single instrument adopted by the community of nations, the civil, political, economic, social and cultural rights held to belong to every person simply by virtue of being human.
link checked 17 Sept 2026United Nations
Defines who counts as a refugee and binds signatory states not to return a refugee to a country where their life or freedom would be threatened, founding the modern international law of asylum.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Hugo Grotius
Argues the open sea cannot be subject to any nation's sovereignty or ownership because it is inexhaustible and cannot be occupied, founding the doctrine of freedom of the high seas.
link failing as of 17 Sept 2026Hugo Grotius
Founds modern international law by arguing that natural law, custom and treaties bind even sovereign states, and sets out when a war between them can be just.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Max Huber
Holds that sovereignty over territory rests on the continuous and peaceful display of state authority rather than on the mere fact of prior discovery, resolving a dispute over an island claimed by both the US and the Netherlands.
link checked 17 Sept 2026International Military Tribunal
Holds that waging aggressive war and committing crimes against humanity are crimes under international law for which individuals, including heads of state, bear personal criminal responsibility regardless of domestic law.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Jean S. Pictet
The ICRC's own authoritative, article-by-article interpretation of the 1949 Geneva Convention, arguing humanitarian law's protections must be read to cover the situations its drafters could foresee, not only their literal words.
link checked 17 Sept 2026United Nations
Codifies the customary international law rules governing how treaties are made, interpreted, applied and terminated, treating a treaty's ordinary text and context as the primary guide to its meaning.
United Nations
Establishes a comprehensive legal framework for the world's oceans, dividing them into zones of territorial sea, exclusive economic zone, continental shelf and high seas, each carrying different rights and obligations.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Helfer & Slaughter
Identifies the factors — such as direct access for individuals and embeddedness in domestic legal systems — that make courts like the European Court of Justice and the ECtHR actually effective compared with weaker international tribunals.
link checked 17 Sept 2026