Discussions about teaching human rights law often end in a series of frustrating impasses: theory versus practice, universalism versus relativism, domestic litigation versus international tribunals and so on. Rather than stimulate reflection on the nature of human rights law, such discussions lead to a sense that such reflection is irrelevant to the real human rights concerns of the day. I propose an alternative approach, studying human rights law in terms of its complex history, the history that has produced the terms of the well-worn debates with which we are all too familiar. This history is not that of an imaginary linear march from Deuteronomy to the latest treaty. Rather it is a more equivocal, even troubling, history: that of the murky genealogy of modern human rights law in Great Power management of the disintegration of empires, including the Moguls in the mid-19th century, the Ottomans in the late 19th century, the Hapsburgs, Hohenzollerns and Romanovs in the early 20th century, the Nazis in mid-century, and the Soviets in our own time. This history shows the perennial and irremediable involvement of human rights with a wide variety of forms of state power, rather than presenting it, as in more canonical accounts, as somehow always standing in opposition to power. Similarly, teaching about human rights activists should not limit itself to heroes like Mandela, but should include more dubious figures like the liberal colonialists of the French Human Rights League and their British and American counterparts. Finally, it should show how the various bodies of human rights doctrine, such as the rights of minorities, individuals, indigenous peoples, and so on, originated in specific historical moments – origins which often shed light on doctrinal idiosyncrasies, as well as elucidating the deeply conflicting understandings of human rights these doctrines may embody. This approach to teaching human rights better prepares students for the real world of human rights practice and scholarship. It raises such questions as the moral and political costs of the inevitable alliances, or even identification, with state power made by human rights activists – as well as the moral and political costs of not making such alliances. It arms students against premature disillusionment by presenting them with the history of human rights in all its moral and political ambiguity – in a word, in all its humanness.