Building Anew 423issues, and Lauterpacht in human rights. Th ere were new fi gures in the
human- rights fi eld, notably in the United States. One was Louis Henkin of
Columbia University. Another was Louis Sohn, originally Polish, who had
the singular good fortune to be on the very last boat out of Poland in 1939
before the war broke out. He was going to Harvard to study— where he be-
came a research assistant, and then professorial successor, to Manley Hud-
son. Th omas Buergenthal had the most immediate reasons to be committed
to the fi eld of human rights. Originally from Czech o slo vak i a and Poland, he
had been interned in concentration camps as a child by the Nazis. Aft er
moving to the United States at the end of the war, he went on to hold various
academic posts and also to serve as a judge on the Inter- American Court of
Human Rights (in 1979– 91) and later on the World Court (in 2000– 10).
As in the past, liberals were explicit in pointing out what they saw as the
shortcomings of positivism. Wright objected to positivism on the ground
that it “reduces international law to such small proportions that it is able to
deal with few disputes” and that, in positivist doctrine, “the community of
nations” becomes a mere “slightly attenuated anarchy.” He insisted that
international law must possess some creative capacity— that it must contain
“within itself the means of its own change.” While in past centuries, that
had meant an appeal to natural- law principles, in today’s world, he thought
that it is “perhaps better... expressed by the word ‘justice’ as interpreted by
predominant world opinion.” In order for progress to occur, there must
fi rst be a belief in justice— with that belief then implemented through law.
In the other great liberal cause— the promotion of human rights—
Lauterpacht emerged as the leader. In 1945, he pleaded for the enactment of
an “International Bill of the Rights of Man” (in a book with that title). Two
years later, in his Hague Academy lectures, he continued the struggle, with
a candid warning that “some sacrifi ces of sovereignty” would be necessary
to attain the goal of eff ective protection of human rights. And he unapolo-
getically regarded the human- rights movement as a step toward “fi nally con-
stituting the individual a subject of the international commonwealth.”
At the heart of international human- rights law, there remained certain
legal conundrums that continued to elude resolution. Foremost among
them was the question of the very nature of that law. Did the various human-
rights treaties (such as the Covenants of 1966) actually create the rights in
question, or should the treaties instead be regarded as merely providing