Authors’ original version. The review final version was published in The Modern Law Review, Vol 84, issue 3, 2021, pp. 654-657. 1 Christoph Menke, Critique of Rights, translated by Christopher Turner, Cambridge: Polity Press, 2020, 350 pp, hb £55.00 Eduardo A. Chia & Daniel Dodds  What new insights might a new title on the criticism of rights offer to legal theory and jurisprudence? Following a long tradition in critical theory, Critique of Rights by Christoph Menke seeks to explain the genesis and necessity of the paradoxical form of modern rights. What does this paradox mean? In Leviathan, Thomas Hobbes had already highlighted the tension between ius and lex, or right and law. This description refers to the two-sided structure of modern law. On the one hand, through the form of rights the law recognises individual freedom as a pre-political and pre-legal right; on the other hand, the law as a sovereign product, at the same time, permits and enables that freedom. An analysis of this paradoxical structure is the primary purpose of Menke’s book. The book is organised into four parts, each divided into shorts chapters addressing specific topics. The first three parts develop historical, ontological, and critical theses, respectively. The final part, titled ‘Revolution’ proposes a new way of understanding the law characterised as the ‘new right’ of ‘counter-rights’. We will return to this. Regarding methodology, the book is notable in terms of the breadth of theoretical resources on which it draws. It expansively brings together and puts to the test insights from both the Anglo- American and the civil law traditions. Menke’s discussion ranges over the theories of Dworkin, Raz, and Waldron in Anglo-American analytical jurisprudence, to Savigny, Kelsen and Teubner in continental legal theory. Supporting theoretical background is drawn from Hegel, Marx, Weber, Adorno, Foucault and Luhmann, amongst others. There are similarities to and differences from other strands of critical legal scholarship. Menke’s work shares with postmodern critical jurisprudence the assumption about law’s necessary relation with violence (see eg Douzinas and Geary, Critical Jurisprudence, Hart, 2005). However, Menke does not propose a deconstructive hermeneutical project. Nor does he focus on the politics of adjudication or scholar activism,  Goethe-Universität, Frankfurt am Main