ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on some of Richard Falk's many contributions as a human rights scholar and practitioner. Falk was a pioneer who conceived and advanced ideas that would later develop into their own interdisciplinary field of human rights studies. Falk addressed one of the most paradoxical aspects of human rights: the tension between universal legal norms and state sovereignty. The role of international human rights law began to expand in the late 1980s and early 1990s. This shift was spurred by political transformations in Latin America with the return to civilian governments, South Africa with the end of apartheid, and Eastern Europe following the collapse of the Soviet Union. Another significant and contentious development created by the changed international environment following the end of the Cold War has involved leveraging international law norms to justify military interventions in certain situations where states perpetrate gross violations against their own populations.
