The aim of this column is to illuminate a divergence which apparently exists amongst scholars in the burgeoning field of human rights education (HRE) concerning the value of law in educating about, through and for human rights. To this end, the column critically reviews a wide spectrum of views in the scholarly literature on HRE between those who are either supportive of the need to include law and legal knowledge law in HRE, agnostic about its benefits, or squarely against it on the basis of a perceived Western bias. It concludes with a call for greater cross-disciplinary engagement and deeper reflection by legal scholars in particular on the contribution that they could potentially make to the emerging debate about the value of law in the scholarly field of HRE.