I was fortunate to be among those who attended a meeting at the University of Birmingham, England, in April 1973, at which the ISFL was conceived. There is an account of it by Harry D. Krause in the American Journal of Comparative Law, vol. 22 (1) 216–7 (1974). I am not sure whose idea it originally was, but the meeting’s hosts must have been significantly involved. They were J. Neville Turner and Anthony H. Manchester. Anthony became the ISFL’s first Treasurer. His later academic interests turned towards legal history. Neville was the first General Secretary; he later went to Australia (Monash University), where he developed a wide range of interests, including in sports law, law and literature, history and jazz. There was an affectionate obituary, accessible at https://oztypewriter. blogspot.com/2018/04/death-of-gentleman-and-scholar.html, published after he passed away in 2018. It is extraordinary to think that his role in the early stages of a successful international organisation can be counted among the many fruits of his varied interests.

Other names mentioned by Krause were obviously important in the formation of the society, and most went on to play significant parts in it. Ze’ev Falk’s quiet yet insistent determination to bring about the ISFL’s objectives made him an obvious first President. Of the others Krause mentions (Olive Stone, Frank Bates, Alastair Bissett-Johnson, Mauricette Craffe, Henry Finlay, Dieter Giesen, Aidan Gough, Sanford Katz, Julien Payne, Jennifer Temkin and Ray Watson), I later got to know particularly well Bates, Finlay, Giesen, Katz and Krause himself. Frank and Henry were wonderful hosts when I later visited Australia, and each did important work for the ISFL. I maintained contact with Henry’s wife, Leah, for many years after he died.

Dieter Giesen later spent time as a Visiting Fellow of my college (Pembroke, Oxford), mixing in enthusiastically with the other Fellows, and the then Master, with whom he shared a taste for good malt whisky, as part of his almost obsessive drive to engage with the English-speaking (and common law) world.