With Australia heading toward a referendum next year on a constitutionally enshrined indigenous ‘voice’ to parliament, the need for a book on the perils of ‘locking in rights’ is never more urgent or apparent. Professor James Allan’s tome, The Age of Foolishness, fulfils this need. As Allan himself writes, it goes against the current legal orthodoxy, ‘opposed to the preponderant views and positions of those not just in legal academia but also of those in the wider lawyerly caste’.