Human rights are not primarily about legality but rather moral commitments and morally informed actions on a collective political level. That is the place of nation state sovereignty. Law can of course play an important role in codifying sovereign decisions, but laws cannot take the place of sovereignty – conversation with David Tse-Chien Pan. David TSE-CHIEN PAN (BA Stanford University; PhD Columbia University) is Professor of German at the University of California, Irvine. His work engages deeply with European philosophical and literary traditions. A central idea in his scholarship involves how our values have an independent standing and cannot be reduced either to material conditions or to ideal claims.