Means of Law rethinks the relationship between the state of emergency and human rights as a dialectic.

Challenging the widespread assumption that emergency powers and individual rights stand in simple opposition, Jonas Heller argues that they are structurally and functionally complementary. At the heart of this complementarity lies the modern concept of the legal person. Modern law liberates individuals from the forms of traditional rule only at the cost of new forms of domination, since the legal person who is the subject of human rights is also the means by which the state can exercise political agency.

Departing from a sustained engagement with the works of Carl Schmitt and Giorgio Agamben, the book reconstructs the juridical form of modern law as a dialectic between entitlement and disenfranchisement. Human rights appear not only as normative limits on state power but also as legal means through which individuals are constituted, addressed, and regulated as a population. Likewise, the state of emergency is shown not merely as a suspension of law, but as an intensified form of state action that draws on the same juridical structures that underwrite rights.

Finally, Means of Law develops an alternative proposal for understanding the link between the state of emergency and human rights via Franz Neumann's critique of the concept of the legal person, returning to the question of sovereignty as that which allows the state to act upon the people by means of law.