Julius Stone was one of the twentieth century’s most influential scholars in the field of international law. The Challis Professor of Jurisprudence and International Law at the University of Sydney from 1942 to 1972, Stone also held distinguished positions in the United States, United Kingdom, New Zealand, and Israel. As a public intellectual and adviser to international bodies, Stone was instrumental in shaping international policy, from the creation of Israel to the establishment of a “hotline” linking the White House and Kremlin during the Cold War. Stone’s particular contribution to the rapidly changing field of international law, however, was to develop a sociological approach to its study. This approach, which underpinned his meticulous scholarly analysis of the law and drove his insightful and pragmatic contributions in the field of international policy, offered a new way of analyzing international law and understanding how it could be developed so as better to contribute to global justice.

On Saturday June 29, 1946, the British mandatory government of Palestine placed Jewish towns and villages under curfew, conducting an extensive search for arms and documents. More than 2,700 people were arrested during Operation Agatha – Black Sabbath, in Yishuv parlance. Among them were members of the Jewish Agency Executive, including the director of its Political Department, Moshe Sharett (Shertok), Israel’s future first foreign minister. His Majesty’s government’s promise of November 2, 1917 to “view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a National Home for the Jewish people” had, evidently, gone sour.

Hans Kelsen’s 1969 biography, written by his former assistant Rudolph Aladár Métall, does not begin – as perhaps expected in the genre – by describing Kelsen’s immediate family or early childhood. Rather, Métall takes us many centuries back, to an age when Roman Legionaries defended the borders of the empire, between Germany and Luxemburg. For supplies, the Romans relied on Jewish sutlers, who eventually settled in the area. A small village – “Kelsen über Saarburg” – was one of these settlements. In the eighteenth century, when Austrian Jews were given German surnames, many took the names of their places of origin. In this manner, Métall tells us, the surname “Kelsen” came to be. Hans Kelsen, thus, is not a foreigner: he is of firm Habsburgian-German roots.

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.

In July 1948, while on a lecture tour in Colorado, Hersch Zvi Lauterpacht, the Whewell Chair of International Law at the University of Cambridge, received two urgent letters. The first was from the fledgling State of Israel, locked in a bitter war of independence against its Arab neighbors. The Israeli government now faced a new legal challenge. The Syrians had sought a ruling from the International Court of Justice invalidating the legal basis for the Jewish State’s Declaration of Independence. The Israelis turned to Lauterpacht to ask what they should do. Almost to the day this request for help arrived, Lauterpacht received a similar entreaty from the tiny Indian Principality of Hyderabad. This princely kingdom had the misfortune of being located physically in the heart of the new Union of India. With a population that was 85 percent Hindu and a Muslim ruler reputed to be the richest man in the world, Hyderabad had attempted to maintain its independence, declining to join either Pakistan or India.

In an earlier moment, the Jewish League of Nations official Albert Cohen undermined the veneer of glamour that might be associated with the work of global governance in his sardonic depiction of the League’s international civil service. Hazzard’s account of the UN particularly captured the mood of the post-war decade when The Organization Man – William Whyte’s sociological study of the arbitrary rules of corporate conformity – ruled the bestseller lists.

In July 1948, while on a lecture tour in Colorado, Hersch Zvi Lauterpacht, the Whewell Chair of International Law at the University of Cambridge, received two urgent letters. The first was from the fledgling State of Israel, locked in a bitter war of independence against its Arab neighbors. The Israeli government now faced a new legal challenge. The Syrians had sought a ruling from the International Court of Justice invalidating the legal basis for the Jewish State’s Declaration of Independence. The Israelis turned to Lauterpacht to ask what they should do. Almost to the day this request for help arrived, Lauterpacht received a similar entreaty from the tiny Indian Principality of Hyderabad. This princely kingdom had the misfortune of being located physically in the heart of the new Union of India. With a population that was 85 percent Hindu and a Muslim ruler reputed to be the richest man in the world, Hyderabad had attempted to maintain its independence, declining to join either Pakistan or India.

We think of international lawyers as “a society of Brahmins,” Justice Robert Jackson told the American Society of International Law in an April 1945 lecture, “but it would be nearer the truth to say that it is a collection of pariahs.” Jackson’s suggestive comment came at a key juncture in the history of international law. Two weeks later, the United Nations Conference on International Organization opened in San Francisco, where the nations of the world gathered to negotiate a legal charter for a new post-war era of global community. The following month Jackson stepped down from his position on the U.S. Supreme Court to begin his tenure as the chief American prosecutor of the Nuremberg trials. Both events combined to form what he called “one of those infrequent occasions in history when convulsions have uprooted habit and tradition in a large part of the world and there exists not only opportunity, but necessity as well, to reshape … international law.”

This chapter is concerned with a particular type of myopia in human rights law – namely, a myopia about the role that mobility plays in the lives of refugees. Rights that regulate mobility offer protections that are incomplete. And those incomplete protections are also incongruous: the interests protected under the law often do not correspond to the motivations of the refugees who seek to avail themselves of the law.