Jörg Fedtke’s review of Tomuschat’s Human Rights: Between Realism and Idealism, provides a mixed response to the ambitious project of the writer. The book promises to provide a jurisprudential approach to the topic, empirical evidence concerning the respect that human rights currently receive beyond the safety of a purely intellectual discourse, highlight the tension between realism and idealism and the conflict between domestic legal systems and the international legal order. It succeeds at many levels, particularly in the jurisprudential and international components of the narrative. However, the treatment of national level human rights is limited.