Demonstrates that the ratification of treaties generally leads to better human rights practices on average.

Beth Simmons is Clarence Dillon Professor of International Affairs and Director of the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs at Harvard University, Massachusetts. She received her PhD from Harvard University in the Department of Government and has taught international relations, international law, and international political economy at Duke University, North Carolina, the University of California, Berkeley, and Harvard University. Her book Who Adjusts? Domestic Sources of Foreign Economic Policy During the Interwar Years, 1924¿1939, was recognized by the American Political Science Association in 1995 as the best book published in 1994 in government, politics, or international relations. She has worked at the International Monetary Fund with the support of a Council on Foreign Relations Fellowship (1995¿6), has spent a year as a senior fellow at the United States Institute of Peace (1996¿7), spent a year in residence at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University, California (2002¿3), and is currently a Fellow at the Straus Institute for the Advanced Study of Law and Justice at New York University. Her new book is entitled Mobilizing for Human Rights: International Law in Domestic Politics (Cambridge, 2009). Simmons was elected in April 2009 to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

1. Introduction; 2. Why international law? The development of the international human rights regime in the twentieth century; 3. Theories of commitment; 4. Theories of compliance; 5. Civil rights; 6. Equality for women: education, work, and reproductive rights; 7. Humane treatment: the prevalence and prevention of torture; 8. The protection of innocents: rights of the child; 9. Conclusions.