Arthur von Mehren's life and academic work will be chronicled by Michael von Hinden. This brief preface will focus instead on the Joseph Story Research Fellowship Program under which Professor von Mehren brought to Harvard the twelve young German legal scholars who have contributed to this volume, where he oversaw their work here during the last years of his wonderfully productive life.

The Story Research Fellowship represent the lives and values of three remarkable individuals, Joseph Story, to whose memory the program was dedicated, Kurt Nadelmann, who endowed the Fellowships, and of course Arthur von Mehren, who created the program in 1992 and mentored the Fellows up to the time of his death in 2006.

Joseph Story looms large in the history of both American jurisprudence and Harvard Law School. Born in 1779 in Salem, Massachusetts, Story studied at Harvard College and practiced law for a time in his native town. In the early 1800s, he became active in Democratic politics and was appointed to the United States Supreme Court in 1811 when he was only 32 years old. A natural scholar, Story wrote voluminously in almost every area of early nineteenth-century legal literature. His erudition led to his appointment as the first Dane Professor of Law at the Harvard Law School (HLS) in 1829. Although the Law School had been founded in 1817, it had struggled for identity and recognition during the first decade of its existence.