Given what we now know and understand about the complexity of human choice, it is time for international law as a field and as a community of people to embrace the beautiful and messy reality of being human. This chapter calls for a cultural shift in international law and examines some of the advantages and anxieties of such a shift.

Let us return for a moment to the story I shared in the opening chapter, of that candlelit dinner table and the conversation I had with the ICJ judge Z. Recall that we were speaking of a case that the ICJ had taken up concerning an allegation made in 1999 by the Democratic Republic of the Congo that Rwanda had engaged in genocide along the border, highlighted by the fact that Rwanda itself had suffered gravely from genocidal acts less than a decade earlier. Despite the courteous and elegant nature of the dinner, our conversation had turned tense. We both understood the legal basis for the court’s determination that it did not have jurisdiction in this case: Rwanda had consented to the ICJ’s jurisdiction to adjudicate disputes when it had ratified the Genocide Convention.