Drafting committee member Charles Malik commented that the declaration was really answering the question "what is a man?" More specifically, the UN Charter had vowed to protect human rights—but what exactly were "human rights"? These are questions that you could probably write thousands of pages trying to answer. You don't have to—smarter people than us have been writing about it for millennia—but you could.

Luckily, the drafters went for a simpler approach.

Like the Magna Carta and the Bill of Rights (and the Ten Commandments, for that matter), the Universal Declaration of Human Rights uses the tried-and-true format of a list.

The reason for making the declaration a list, rather than a flowery prose document like the Declaration of Independence, boils down to clarity. Getting international consensus required everyone (well, almost everyone) at the U.N. to agree to a clear and concise text.

The drafting committee itself went through several versions, and the U.N.'s General Assembly proposed numerous amendments to the wording of the document and vigorously debated the inclusion of various different items. There's a reason legislative documents are usually in a numbered format: that's the most effective way for a committee to write something.

The list format itself also has inherent advantages.

Lists suggest the quality of being exhaustive. One purpose of a list is to make sure that you don't leave anything out (like when going to the grocery store, sending wedding invitations, or scheduling your fall TV binge list). Since the UDHR has "universal" in the title, it was important to the drafting committee to cover all bases, or at least give the appearance that they'd done so to the greatest possible degree.