Protecting Human Rights: A Comparative Study, Advancing Human Rights. By Todd Landman. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2005. 218p. $54.95 cloth, $29.95 paper.

Political scientists have finally begun to take international law seriously. Todd Landman's new book is an admirable example of this new trend. Situated at the intersection of international relations and comparative politics, it is a sustained study of the role of democratization, development, international socialization and international law on governments' human rights practices since the mid-1980s. It is a global quantitative study that comes to some very different conclusions from the existing literature in this genre. In contrast to the pathbreaking work of Cona Hathaway (“Do Human Rights Treaties Make a Difference?” Yale Law Journal 111 [8, 2002]: 101–99) and Linda Camp Keith (“The United Nations International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights: Does It Make a Difference in Human Rights Behavior?” Journal of Peace Research 36 [no. 1, 1999]: 95–118), the key finding in Landman's study is that international treaty law has contributed to improvements in human rights behavior. How does he come to this unorthodox conclusion, and what does this mean for our understanding of international law and democratic development?