Louis Henkin (1917–2010) is remembered as the leading American legal advocate of human rights, and a prime or even the premier contributor to the international movement in their name. “There is no person on the planet,” observed his follower Harold Koh, dean of Yale Law School and later State Department legal adviser, late in Henkin’s life, “who has not found shelter or affirmation in his ideas.”

It is not unthinkable that in considering human rights law one might flirt with whether its norms or practices are a case of “Judaism terminable and interminable,” as Henkin’s colleague in Jewish history at Columbia University Yosef Yerushalmi famously described psychoanalysis, whatever the modern and secular trappings of both.