 One prominent moral-political rubric for assessing international law is the contested idea of “legitimacy”. Sometimes “legitimacy” is used as a catch-all term encompassing any kind of assessment of law, but this usage is too broad. A starting-point in achieving greater specificity is the distinction between de facto (or descriptive) and de jure (or normative) interpretations of legitimacy. Sometimes talk of the “legitimacy” of international law is a matter of describing the degree to which it is accepted, or complied with, by its putative subjects, primarily states. On this de facto interpretation, an international legal norm will enjoy legitimacy to the extent that it exerts a high level of “compliance pull” among international actors. A substantive study of de facto legitimacy investigates the features that tend to enhance support for, and compliance with, international law (Franck 1995).