Students Encouraged to Explore the Full Scope of International Law in Career Talk

In collaboration with Stanford Global Studies, the Center for Human Rights and International Justice hosted the “Careers in International Law” panel on November 14, 2024. The panel — which brought Center Associate Director Penelope Van Tuyl into conversation with Gulika Reddy, Director of the International Human Rights Clinic at Stanford Law School — explored how international law might be leveraged to drive progress on the diversity of issues that students care about. 

From the private sector to the public sector, and across cultural contexts, Van Tuyl and Reddy both urged students to think about what “international law” could mean for their communities. 

“When I was in India, I would describe my work with law as ‘human rights’ or ‘social justice’ work. I always joke that, when I left India, the work I was doing became international,” Reddy said. “International human rights law draws upon the same body of law in both regional contexts, so the only thing that’s different is the perception of the practice.”

In HUMRTS 101, the gateway course of the Center’s interdisciplinary minor in human rights, Van Tuyl said she invites diverse guest speakers from different fields to show students that there exists a whole range of ways to work as a human rights practitioner. 

“When I was growing up in the late 1990s and early 2000s, [the field of] international criminal law was really young,” Van Tuyl said. “There was this foolishness, this feeling that the UN would swoop in and be a savior at an international level. But I realized that it does not work that way — any institution is only as good as the people who are there to use it and make it real in the world.”

To Van Tuyl, the failures of human rights norms do not render the norms themselves meaningless. Instead, they drive home the idea that each generation has the duty to keep fighting to imbue them with meaning. 

Rather than going directly into law school, which can “constrain you if you don’t go in with a very strong sense of self,” Van Tuyl encourages students to first reflect on what they want to do with their law degree. For pathways in human rights law, she said, that means a “piecing-together of the issues that motivate you — whether that be climate change, labor rights, reproductive rights, or racial justice — and the organizations where impact can be made.”

While a career in international law can mean working at an international institution which explicitly seeks to enforce it, such as the International Criminal Court, both panelists emphasized the multitude of ways to engage with human rights law outside courtrooms. Before going to law school, Van Tuyl suggests that students find ways to be administratively supportive (or adjacent) to the kind of work they’re interested in pursuing. Reddy, who in addition to law has worked in grassroots activism and public education, also encourages students to expose themselves to a wider range of advocacy tools beyond just litigation. At a time of widespread human rights abuses, sometimes those efforts require trying to protect the rights that are currently articulated in international treaties without actually being enforced. 

“When laws are lacking or when institutions are failing, reaching for the frameworks of international law can be the only tool [that local advocacy groups] have to legitimate their point of view,” Van Tuyl said.