Florentino Feliciano smiles down on me nowadays from the wall of the chambers of the Appellate Body of the World Trade Organization with the same small smile he wore on the day we first met at the WTO all those years ago.

‘Call me Toy’, he said. So I did. We all did.

Everyone everywhere calls him ‘Toy’. Everyone everywhere has always called him ‘Toy’. Florentino Feliciano was one of the most distinguished jurists on the planet long before there was such a thing as an Appellate Body or a WTO, and yet, then as now, far and wide, he has been always simply ‘Toy’.

‘Toy’ is a familiar nickname in the Philippines. For my friend Florentino, it is a nickname he has had since his childhood. This is fitting; for it was in his childhood in the Philippines that the beginnings were made of the great judge that Toy became.

Born in 1928, Toy was thirteen when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor. A few weeks later, Japanese forces overran and occupied the Filipino capital of Manila. The occupation forces closed the Catholic school where American Jesuits had been teaching the teenager Toy.

This, however, was not the end of Toy's wartime education. Toy's father, an engineer and geologist who taught at the University of the Philippines for thirty-nine years, had studied in the USA in the 1930s at the University of Chicago.