Peter Birks was the leading academic jurist of our generation. We do not use the term ‘jurist’ very often in this country, and I am not sure I have used it before. But no other word catches so exactly Peter's dedication to abstract legal scholarship and his leadership in promoting it as an enterprise of supreme worth. We began our careers together as assistant lecturers at University College London in the mid-1960s, seduced by the £1,000 a year which seemed just enough to divert us from practice. For each of us it turned out to be a permanent diversion, as in Peter's case might well have been guessed at the time. His evident excitement about legal ideas at once infected me, and – since it never dimmed – it continued to affect me whenever we met over the next forty years. As young lecturers we were keen to share our little discoveries, both intellectual and mundane: in one mad vacation we even set up our own bindery in the basement of what is now Bentham House in order to restore a heap of decaying books rescued from a colleague's chambers in Lincoln's Inn. Re-covering the outsides of old law books was one thing; recovering what was inside them was the greater challenge, and less disagreeable to our colleagues. What united us especially in beginning that greater task was the teaching of Professor Milsom, by which we had both been fired with enthusiasm – Peter was taking the LLM course in his spare time, while I had been an undergraduate student.