 The rise and global expansion of sovereignty, described and even lauded by political philosophers, amounts to one of the most formidable and successful political trends in modern times. But from its earliest days, sovereignty has also met with both doubters and qualified supporters, many of whom have regarded any body of law’s claim to sovereign status as a form of idolatry, sometimes as a carapace behind which rulers carry out cruelties and injustices free from legitimate outside scrutiny. It was indeed after the Holocaust that meaningful legal and institutional circumscriptions of sovereignty in fact arose, many of which have come to abridge the rights of sovereign states quite significantly. The two most prominent curtailments are conventions on human rights and European integration.