If I were a lawyer, I would do...what, exactly?

I think if you want to help refugees, it's probably better to get a degree in a technical field (sanitation, engineering, ect...) than law. Plenty of international refugee policy people don't have JDs, for the simple reason that there's just not really any "law" involved. (The same goes for most international human rights issues, actually.) The law that there is -- treaties and such -- can be adequately understood by nonlawyers. In the US, though, human rights is increasingly professionalized, and most people do have JDs at this point, I think. The good thing about getting a JD is that human rights is a very, very hard field to break into. You either have to luck out and get a fellowship, or you have to have years of relevant pre-law experience. So if you get a JD, you'll have plenty of other people-helping options besides human rights. I can't find them right now, but there were some good askme threads for aspiring human rights/civil rights lawyers that will explain the challenges.

well the one lawyer I know in this line of work is 10 years out of university, and has spent the last 6-ish years or so working in various places around the Asia Pacific region (India, Solomon Islands, PNG and Fiji are the ones that spring to mind) for a handful of NGO and government bodies doing human rights, public access and similar stuff... she seems to enjoy it (at least she keeps taking new contracts when the old ones expire, and hasn't gone back to being a solicitor)... I'll see if she's got any actual useful detail to add... (she's Australian, and has been working for Australian and Commonwealth bodies, so ymmv on the sort of work though...)

Have a good friend who came into international law out of her public policy law interests. She works for NGOs, mostly. It's what she's always wanted to do, though now she's working with a public policy centre tied to a university in the US. I could give you a list of successful skills you'd need for this (language skills are key), but the main things I'd recommend would be flexibility and adaptability to other cultures and points of view. And a clear idea of what you want to do. Womens rights in the developing world are what keeps my friend fired up. She went to work for a large, extremely well known international NGO and quit after 18 months because it was just too bureaucratic. It also held womens rights to be tangential to other rights it might be working on in any given area of the world at any time. She's doing hard core womens rights policy now and is happy as a lark. It can also be disheartening. She found herself in the position of helping write law and attending meetings with consititutional committees that made it absolutely clear they had no intent of really changing things but were there for appearances for the sake of aid money. Could you survive something like that, day in and day out? She also has a masters in international relations, so I guess she could go corporate in a pinch... but never would need to, at this rate. If you are in the US, the ABA has some terrific fellowships for this field. Good luck!

Get ready to suck the will to live out of completely ordinary, well-adjusted citizens on a daily basis. Ask Tex about this one, he seems good at it.

You may want to check out the http://www.icc-cpi.int/recruitment.html and/or International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia [http://www.un.org/icty/pratical-e/jobs/jobsindex2.htm, http://www.un.org/icty/pratical-e/intern/internindex.htm]. These are high-profile cases and you will work with some of the best criminal attorneys in the world.

Your best bet for using a law degree to make a difference in the area of international human rights is to work for the highest-paying corporate law firm you can find, donating your salary, minus living expenses, to relevant charities. You'll only cause harm (assuming for the sake of argument that corporate law firms are Satan) to the extent that you're better than the next-best person who would have been hired, just as, working for some ineffectual, bureaucratic-off-its-ass NGO, you'll only make a difference to the extent that you're better than the next-best person. Would you rather contribute that difference, or would you rather contribute the difference that hundreds of thousands, even millions of dollars can make? I know what I'd choose.

Of the 30 or so law students I studied with who focussed (as in specialist masters degree) on this area exactly zero of them managed to get paying, non-academic, work in this field. They were from all over the world, all different backgrounds, all very competent, etc. Sorry about the bad news.