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Abstract
Louis Sohn was an émigré scholar who fled Poland for the USA in 1939, two weeks before the Nazis invaded. His most widely known work is World Peace through World Law, co-written with Grenville Clark, a vision for a reconstructed United Nations. Writing at a time when political realism was ascendant in the USA, Sohn was labeled an 'idealist'. Yet a strain of pragmatism also runs through his scholarship, leading many to praise him as one of the architects of modern international law. As a scholar-practitioner with a mission to help build the post-World War II international order, little overt legal theorizing appears in his work. But a close reading reveals ideas that drew implicitly on extant theory or were developed by later theorists without reference to Sohn's writing. To help frame the analysis, this article situates Sohn's writing in two strands of theoretical literature: pre-positivist, positivist and 'post-positivist' approaches to law-making by international organizations; and functionalist, constitutionalist and deliberative approaches to the powers of, and constraints on, those organizations. Sohn does not fall neatly into any of those categories; instead, fragments of his work can be found at many points along each spectrum. While the fragments do not add up to a coherent whole, the theoretical contributions of this 'pragmatic idealist' are greater than meets the eye.

In 1945, world leaders gathered in San Francisco to sign the United Nations Charter, which laid the blueprint for today's international system. The institutional architecture that was built around the United Nations, including its specialized agencies (such as the World Bank and World Health Organization) and funds and programs (such as the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) and the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR)), survived the Cold War and seemed to have hit its stride in the immediate post-Cold War era. Yet the global distribution of power has changed, states are no longer the sole actors in international affairs, and the very idea of global governance is being called into question. Not surprisingly, there is much questioning of whether the institutional architecture that was built almost seventy-five years ago is still fit for purpose. Policymakers are rightly focused on reform of that architecture. Rather than tinkering at the margins, this panel was conceived with a more radical agenda. If the UN did not exist today, would we create it? If so, what would it look like?

Critiques of decision making in international organizations are often framed in terms of the democratic deficit. Leveled against the United Nations Security Council, the charge has become more pointed in light of recent quasi-legislative and quasi-judicial acts—most notably the adoption of Resolutions 1373 and 1540 on the financing of terrorism and the spread of weapons of mass destruction, respectively, and the Resolution 1267 sanctions regime, which targets individuals suspected of involvement in terrorism. With the first two resolutions, the Security Council imposed general obligations on all states for an indefinite period; with the third, it set up a sanctions committee that has courtlike powers to identify and freeze the assets of individuals, groups, and corporations. Despite broad sympathy among the UN membership for collective counterterrorist action in the aftermath of the attacks of September 11, 2001, a degree of skepticism accompanied these initiatives from the start and grew with the diplomatic debacle surrounding the war in Iraq. Some critics asked whether an "imperial" Security Council had become an instrument for the imposition of "hegemonic international law." The Council has moved to address these concerns, but they remain serious enough that the regimes established under Resolutions 1267, 1373, and 1540 are at risk of collapsing.