This should have been a Festschrift. When the Harvard Law School decided in 2005 to discontinue the Joseph Story Research Fellowship, it spelled the end for what had been a remarkable example in transatlantic scholarship. Over the course of 13 years, twelve young German scholars from Hamburg and Heidelberg had come to Harvard to work with Arthur von Mehren on comparative conflict of laws. The end of this fellowship seemed a good opportunity to put together a special Festschrift, different from the one that Arthur had received just a few years earlier on the occasion of his eightieth birthday. Instead of collecting articles on various fields, we asked the Story Fellows to contribute articles dealing specifically with transatlantic conflict of laws – the field that had been at the core of our collaboration with Arthur von Mehren. All Fellows, past and present, were immediately excited about the opportunity to give something back to the scholar from whom we all had learned so much, and we all went to work at once.

Sadly, this book did not become a Festschrift. Arthur's death, on January 16, 2006, turned what would have been a celebration into a commemoration. Michael von Hinden's warm appreciation of Arthur's life and work in this book looks back on Arthur von Mehren's important influence on the fields of comparative law and conflict of laws in the twentieth century.