Batman has a rule. He does not kill.

It is a strange rule for a man who spends his nights confronting criminals, often violently, and who possesses more than enough power to end many of his conflicts permanently. However, that is precisely what makes the rule meaningful. Batman does not refrain from killing because he cannot. He refrains because he has decided that there is a line he will not cross. The moment he assumes for himself the authority to decide who deserves to live and who deserves to die, he risks becoming another source of the very violence he seeks to defeat.

International law presents a surprisingly similar paradox.

International law is an unusual legal system. Unlike domestic legal orders, it does not operate under a single sovereign authority with a monopoly over legitimate coercion. There is no global police force capable of routinely enforcing every international obligation. States retain sovereignty; jurisdiction frequently depends upon consent; and enforcement may depend upon diplomacy, reciprocity, countermeasures, political pressure or collective action. International law is therefore often criticised for being “soft.”

But describing international law merely as weak misses something important. Its decentralised character also reflects a fundamental problem: if international law were given unlimited coercive force, who would control that force? Before engaging with this question, there must be caution exercised that Batman’s code does not answer for the effectiveness of International law today. However, Batman’s choice in not committing the ultimate act is different from the structural foundations of International law that necessarily and not by choice preclude a single power. The comparison therefore only assesses whether the presence of continuous restraint (be it by choice or structure) legitimises the power exercised.

The Nicaragua judgment illustrates both sides of this problem. In Military and Paramilitary Activities in and against Nicaragua (Para 190), the International Court of Justice recognised the prohibition of the use of force as a customary rule and described it as a “fundamental or cardinal principle” of international law. The Court also referred to the prohibition as possessing the character of jus cogens. Yet the Court did not itself possess a global police force capable of physically compelling the United States to comply with its judgment. International law therefore produced a legal determination without possessing the corresponding monopoly of coercion.

This paradox is important. The authority of international law does not necessarily depend upon its ability to compel obedience at gunpoint. It can instead operate by establishing standards against which the exercise of power is judged globally. Batman does something similar. His code does not make him physically incapable of killing; it makes killing illegitimate for him. The distinction is crucial. His power is constrained not by incapacity but by principle.

The Barcelona Traction case provides another dimension to this idea. In Barcelona Traction (paras. 33–34), the Court drew “an essential distinction” between obligations owed to particular States and obligations owed “towards the international community as a whole.” International law therefore does not simply regulate bargains between States; it increasingly articulates standards that protect interests understood to transcend individual States.

The same principle underlies Batman’s code. His strength does not create unlimited authority. Rather, his strength makes the existence of limits more important.

Alternatively, this also reveals the danger of giving international law unlimited coercive power. If a small group of States, or a single international institution, possessed unrestricted authority to determine violations and impose consequences, the system could reproduce the very concentration of power that international law seeks to restrain. The question would cease to be merely whether conduct is lawful and become: who has the authority to decide what is lawful?

Batman understands this intuitively. His code prevents him from becoming judge, jury and executioner. The restraint is what separates justice from vengeance. International law confronts a similar dilemma: it seeks to regulate power without creating a single power so overwhelming that it becomes itself unaccountable.

The Nuclear Weapons Advisory Opinion captures the deeper normative character of this project (Para 79). The ICJ observed that fundamental humanitarian rules are rooted in “elementary considerations of humanity” and constitute “intransgressible principles of international customary law.” International law therefore does not merely tell States what they can do; at its most fundamental level, it establishes what even sovereign power must not do.

This is why the relative softness of international law should not automatically be understood as a failure. It is certainly a vulnerability: powerful States can evade consequences, enforcement can be selective, and legal judgments can lack immediate coercive effect. But its decentralisation is also connected to the foundational principle of sovereign equality. International law is not enforcement-free; rather, it is enforcement without a single global sovereign.  Batman’s code ultimately expresses the same paradox. The person who possesses power is not necessarily entitled to exercise all of it. Indeed, the legitimacy of power may depend upon the willingness to restrain it. 

Refusing to kill does not, on its own, resolve the deeper problem of a private actor exercising unaccountable coercion and surveillance outside democratic authorisation, it only rules out one form of it. This essay does not attempt to resolve that broader problem; it notes it only to keep the analogy’s ambit focussed: restraint on the use of lethal force is the single point of comparison being drawn, not a claim that either Batman or international law has thereby settled the wider question of legitimate authority. The point therefore is narrower; the case for a stronger coercive apparatus has to reckon who would hold it.  In some way, it gestures toward the idea that power in society may be more legitimate when exercised under restraint, though the comparison can only raise that possibility, not establish it. Batman’s greatest strength is therefore not his ability to defeat his enemies. It is his willingness to accept a limit upon himself. International law embodies a similar paradox. Its apparent weakness may partly be the price of refusing to create an even greater power; one capable of enforcing law upon everyone, but potentially accountable to no one.

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Angad Singh Chadha is a fifth year law student at Jindal Global Law School.

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