"Michael Perry's new book, The Idea of Human Rights, is in my view the best thing that this unusually thoughtful legal scholar has yet done. It is hardly possible to exaggerate the importance of the central idea that he is pursuing: that to speak, as so many claim to do, of 'human rights' from a purely secular perspective may well not make any sense. His willingness to confront the implications of 'the death of God' is precisely what is absent from so much moral, legal, and political rights talk...