The book emerged from the author's many years of study of Hegel's and Kant's philosophy of law, in which the focus increasingly shifted to Kant and the justification of human rights. With Kant, Fulda locates the roots of human rights in the right-determining faculty of practical reason that is inherent in every human being and whose binding force is in principle recognizable to every human being. Fulda, however, identifies the systematic place from which human rights arise in Kant's "postulate of public law", which he interprets, contrary to the common view in Kant literature, not as an obligation to the state, but as a requirement to cooperate. He explains how Kant can be further developed with regard to the concept and justification of human rights on the basis of a completely new understanding of the doctrine of public law.