International Human Rights Law

Abstract

It is a great honor to deliver this lecture in honor of the late Dean Robert F. Boden. I am grateful to all of you for attending. My topic tonight is international law and peace among nations. It may seem a poor fit for a lecture honoring Dean Boden. I did not know him, but I have read that Dean Boden was passionately dedicated to teaching law students about the actual day-to-day practice of law. He believed that law schools should be focused on that sort of professional training—not on policy questions or preparing students to be “architects of society,” as one of his successors characterized his views.1 International law involves lots of policy. And some international law involves structuring or building a global society of sorts. Yet it also demands outstanding technical lawyers—the very ones that we train, you at Marquette and I at Vanderbilt. Beyond that, international law addresses many topics about which lawyers and other leaders in Milwaukee and Nashville should be educated, even passionate. Those include my topic tonight. So I think that Dean Boden would approve.