I met his spirit before I met him in person. It was at the end of the 1970s, and I was working at the Max Planck Institute for Comparative and International Private Law as a member of the editorial staff of the International Encyclopedia of Comparative Law. I had the privilege of reading manuscripts of chapters, which had been finalized by the authors and approved by the volume editors. It was my task to draw the general editor's attention to unclear or contradictory passages of the various texts. Moreover, I had to survey the author's compliance with the basic methodological approach of the Encyclopedia, which is the elaboration of model solutions for a given substantive problem from the great variety of national laws. As time went by, I noticed that many authors had great difficulty attaining this objective. For most of them, the point of intellectual departure by necessity appeared to be their own national law, not the societal or economical conflict or the substantive issue that can occur anywhere.

Arthur von Mehren was different. I studied his introduction to the contract volume of the Encyclopedia with great attention and growing enthusiasm. I soon realized that it was a masterpiece of functional comparison. To date, I remember how much I was impressed by the treatment of consideration and its equivalence in other legal systems.