This project was too big for one person and too vast for one year. In writing this book I have had the good fortune to be helped by many enthusiastic people. I opted to delegate separate chapters to experts in the relevant fields, such as education, research, third mission, psychology and governance. I am so grateful to them all, and mention their names and backgrounds below. I would like to express my special thanks to Richard Astley and Ted May, with whom I have had intensive discussions about different drafts of the whole book on a number of occasions in the past year. I am exceptionally grateful to them for their critical comments, their support and for the fine discussions we had. I would also like to thank Rosmarijn van Kleef, Otto Nieuwenhuis and Catherine Stip, who, as former students of Leiden Law School, provided welcome help and support at different times in my research. I thank Ann O’Brien, Executive Director of the T. M. C. Asser Instituut, The Hague, for her many valuable comments on the substance of the book. My thanks also go to Boudewijn Sirks, Regius Professor at All Souls College Oxford, for his hospitality and his interest in the project, in that amazing place where the first Professor of English Law, William Blackstone, was once appointed and where the very buildings, books and people have merged to form a magical site. I would also like to make separate mention of my oldest daughter, Sophie, a master’s student at Leiden Law School. In recent years, while I have been involved in writing this book but also during my time as dean of the law school where she was a student, she had been a constant reminder of what legal education should be about: the development of students in so many different ways. It will not always have been easy for her, having her father as dean, but over recent years I have often thought: if, as Dean, you want to know what is really going on in your law school, enrol your own child! xi