Recent events have me thinking about how we teach international law in the United States. In talking to colleagues, reading the news, and comparing responses from U.S. and non-U.S. scholars to U.S. actions in Venezuela, the U.S. seizing oil tankers, the U.S. withdrawing from international organizations and conventions, etc., etc. I realized my question shouldn’t be how we teach international law, but if we teach international law in the United States. Based on a very informal LinkedIn poll,[1] a question posted on BlueSky,[2] and a quick review of U.S. law school curriculums, it looks like most U.S. law schools don’t require any type of international law course to graduate. This isn’t surprising given everything law students must accomplish in three years, but it is disheartening. It makes me wonder if we’re doing our students a disservice by not requiring that they engage with some type of international law during law school. It also makes me wonder if some of the issues our country and profession are currently facing might be helped through promoting a better understanding of international law.    

In February 2025, Monica Hakimi and Jacob Katz Cogan wrote in the American Journal of International Law that “as the U.S. power structure that undergirds critical components of international law changes, so too will the architecture and content of international law.”[3] Hakimi and Cogan stated that the U.S. was the “principal guarantor and had outsized impact on establishing, preserving, and sustaining” international law norms and rules. Although U.S. commitments to international law have waned over the years and are now being decimated, the fact that the U.S. has played a significant role in international law might lead you to assume U.S. law schools would include more international law-related requirements in the curriculum. But my cursory analysis doesn’t support this assumption. Based on my LinkedIn poll, the respondents who said that international law is a required course at their law schools appear to be all or mostly from non-U.S. law schools. Non-U.S. law schools appear to be emphasizing the importance of international law in a way U.S. law schools are not. If a U.S. law student wants to study international law there are opportunities through a variety of classes, programs, and centers, but a law student could potentially make it through three-years of law school without learning the difference among foreign law, international law, and comparative law. Students and attorneys who don’t understand international law and the U.S. role in international law might not fully comprehend the precarious and uncertain place we are currently in. Just this week, Oona A. Hathaway and Scott J. Shapiro, wrote in Foreign Affairs that following the U.S. actions in Venezuela: “It is not just the existing international legal system that is in jeopardy now. At risk is the survival of any rules at all – and with them any constraints on the exercise of state power.”

International law is complicated, to say the least. Incorporating it into an already packed curriculum may seem impossible, especially if it’s a topic that isn’t covered on the bar exam or won’t help students stand out in the earlier and earlier firm recruitment timeline. But, are we doing a disservice to our students and the profession by not preparing them to at least know the basics of international law? We’ve seen what the diminishment of civics education has done to the American public’s understanding of U.S. government and democracy. If we aren’t giving law students the knowledge and tools to understand the role of the U.S. in the larger international law ecosystem, how can we expect the U.S. legal profession to meaningfully engage in difficult and consequential debates about international law? How can we expect law students and attorneys to be competent, ethical legal researchers if they don’t know enough about the basics of international law to effectively find and use information? We can’t simply hope our students will figure it out after they graduate.

As an academic law librarian, I think about how I can help students learn about international law through information access. A few things we can do as law librarians to support students and the legal profession are below:

  • Offering international law legal research courses and trainings
  • Assessing our collections to ensure we offer both basic and in-depth materials
  • Collaborating with other libraries to fill gaps through cooperative lending relationships
  • Tracking changes to international law that might impact information access

I don’t have all the information on this problem, nor do I have all the answers. But I think the first few weeks of 2026[4] demonstrate that U.S. law schools and the legal profession need to do more to ensure our students and our profession understand enough about international law to be able to meaningfully engage in productive dialogue with the international community. This post is a starting point for me, and I hope others, to think about if and how we teach international law in U.S. law schools.  

[1] The LinkedIn Poll asked “Is international law a required course at your law school?”. The poll received a total of 27 votes. Six people (22%) responded “yes” and twenty-one people (78%) responded “no.”

[2] One response noted that their law school had an international law course as part of the first-year curriculum.

[3] Monica Hakimi & Jacob Katz Cogan, The End of the U.S.-Backed International Order and the Future of International Law, 119 Am. J. Int’l L. 279, 289 (2025), doi:10.1017/ajil.2025.9.

[4] See, e.g., Maya Yang, ‘I Don’t Need International Law’: Trump Says Power Constrained Online by ‘My Own Morality’, The Guardian (Jan. 8, 2026), https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/jan/08/trump-power-international-law; Claire Donnelly & Meghna Chakrabarti, If Trump Broke International Law, So What?, On Point: WBUR (Jan. 12, 2026), https://www.wbur.org/onpoint/2026/01/12/if-trump-broke-international-law-so-what-venezuela (interviewing Rebecca Hamilton and Scott Anderson); Steven McKenzie, Oil Tanker Seized by US Spotted in Scotland’s Moray Firth, BBC (Jan. 13, 2026), https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cr57v650380o; Sam Meredith, Greenland’s PM Has a Blunt Message for Trump: ‘We Choose Denmark’ Over the U.S., CNBC (Jan. 13, 2026), https://www.cnbc.com/2026/01/13/greenland-denmark-trump-nielsen-frederiksen.html.