In July 2015, Jürgen Backhaus retired from his position as Professor at the University of Erfurt, after a long and rich career, started in 1970 at the University of Constance as an undergraduate student and that brought him all around the world. He was Professor of Public Finance at the University of Maastricht from 1986 to 2001 and, from 2001 to 2015, he held the Krupp Foundation Chair in Public Finance and Fiscal Sociology at the University of Erfurt.1 Jürgen Backhaus published (and edited) tens of books and articles. He was, and still is, a scholar and a man of great immense culture. One of those rare scholars who is knowledgeable in so different fields that it is impossible to name all of them. But even within academia, Jürgen Backhaus is not only a scholar. He also played the role of a cultural entrepreneur. He launched, in 1994, the European Journal of Law and Economics, edited an important reference book, Elgar Companion of Law and Economics, and then had the idea of the Encyclopedia of Law and Economics that it is still an ongoing project involving a large number of contributors around the world, including ourselves as editors; he organized for decades one of the first and long-lasting European workshop in law and economics (first at the University of Maastricht and then at the University of Erfurt) and an interdisciplinary workshop in Heilbr?nn. On the whole, he seemed to develop his scholarly activity as it were guided by the motto written by the Brazilian poet Vinicius De Moraes that said “Life is the art of encounter”. We had the chance to participate in many of those encounters organized by Jürgen, we developed there a significant part of our scholarship and lastly we had the honor, in our turn, of being part of it as editors of journal and the encyclopedia.