It is a very great honour to be invited to give this lecture in memory of Willi Steiner. I was not privileged to know him personally but I have long been aware of the enormous contribution that he made to the development of the Squire Library in Cambridge and the library of the Institute of Advanced Legal Studies, of which I have been a grateful user for many years. I am also very aware of Willi's contribution to legal scholarship in general and in particular to comparative law. His work on the Index to Foreign Legal Periodicals is just one example. I hope and believe that the topic on which I am going to speak tonight would have interested him.