<p>Many teachers of human rights at post-secondary institutions are aware of a creeping pessimism about the subject among students. Rising authoritarianism, climate catastrophe, grinding wars, mass involuntary migration, rampant misinformation and the unsettling possibilities of AI have made the world promised by the human rights project seem a distant prospect, and students express skepticism about its liberatory power or even more modest utility. Confronted with students more eager to critique rights than parse their form and content, the author turned this critical impulse into the material for a course, “Beyond Human Rights Critique?” Taking this reflex for critique as a starting point, the course asked students to reflect on the stakes of such a sensibility, and to move beyond the satisfactions of critique to think about what comes after (and as a result) of such an orientation. Framed around the author’s experience teaching this course, the article asks: what is the value and function of critique in human rights pedagogy today?</p>