Everyone complains that law professors write too much about constitutional law, and not enough about areas of law that actually matter–antitrust, securities regulation, and criminal law. A similar complaint can be directed against international law scholars. On the evidence of the Westlaw database, international law scholars think that human rights deserve vastly more attention than (say) trade law or even the United Nations. In truth, human rights law is of limited practical importance in international relations, and virtually all of this literature–which nearly uniformly argues in favor of more human rights and stronger human rights institutions–will be ignored. If you want evidence that much of what academics do doesn’t matter, and that there is no mechanism for self-correction, see the graph above.