 I'm going to make a very brief introduction to someone who needs some introduction. This morning she's going to talk about his time as director from his inception until 1994 and, hopefully, that some of the work, the very important work in his time, that he came to talk about in central Europe. Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. Can you hear me at the back? Yes. My wife says I have a very low voice. And because I'm coming back to the great subject of sales after a pretty good intermission, that is, I left the job of director sometime in, oh, I think I know exactly when, the Michael was termed 94. So what I'm going to be doing is talking rather too much about myself. I quite like doing that once I get going. But I will stick strictly to the 1994 boundary line, which is when Alan comes in. Off we go. In October 1990 I was appointed to an established professorship of law in Cambridge University and I was all set to carry out a normal pattern of academic activities, teaching legal propositions and researching into why they made up such an agglomeration of rules, procedures, other explications of English law or some other legal system or a branch of it. The post from which I was moving, which was a chair of English law in the law department of the London School of Economics, carried with it the expectation that I would strengthen understandings of what justified particular laws. I had booked an article to my credit, which the electoral board for my chair here thought showed what I could do. Or at least they judged me a better candidate for the job here than other applicants. A game was being played. There could be won by a variety of strategies. In those days, the panel of electors to an established chair in Cambridge University might content themselves with a survey of each candidate's writings for positions in the law faculty. These would not necessarily include a successful PhD thesis, although it was an unsuccessful one, and or an interview face to face with the electoral board. I had neither of these qualifications to present anyway, but somehow I fitted the vision of the electoral board for what was known as the 1973 professorship in law. That's giving away a great deal. My contract with Cambridge, when finally the old schools, Senate House by more respectable terms, the old schools found a draft to send me for my approval in employment matters. I was glad to accept. I would become responsible, so the document said, for delivering 16 lectures on legal subjects each year. My three main subjects were known to the world. The first was the newly constructed law of restitution, also known as, lost my place, Unjust Enrichment, which I was already teaching in the London LLM as view new calling to the great Lord Goff of Chiefly, who had written so splendidly on the subject. My second subject was the law of intellectual property, which I'd introduced as a novel LLM subject in London. And the third was the modern history of English law, covering the period from early industrialization onwards. A matter that I considered trade lawyers in this country should have as part of their cultural makeup. When I presented myself in Cambridge at the beginning of my tenure, it was plain enough that there was no really substantial gap for me to fill in the teaching and research provided by the law faculty other than in intellectual property. So I took to IP with a will, cooperating with others who were already contributing to that intriguing subject area. So let me turn to the foundation of cells itself. It seemed to me that there were two questions worth addressing at this, that's what I'm supposed to be talking to you about, which intensified with the dissipation, disappearance of Cold War attitudes and politics at the very beginning of the 1990s. The first question was, why were cells designated a centre rather than, say, just an institute? And the second question was, why was it that I was asked to take charge of its creation if only for some three or four years? May I say, within cells, and I suspect I'm much to blame, historical records of where we got to from 1990 to 1994 were not very well collected and kept. Felicity, who's done so much to draw today's meeting together, undertook to search for whatever records we had and actually found some. So I have been reading letters to the members of the law faculty, which I guess I drafted, but they don't sound like anything special, and have allowed quite some insight into what was going on, rather at the level of titles and chapters and so forth. There's a need to do some more work on that if we are to keep a proper historical record, and we must do that. Anyway, I do acknowledge what she has done in just a few weeks. Tremendous. So my first question was, why a centre, a rather grand and imposing and wide ranging word that you might choose for what the original team forming a cells would have to think about most definitely? Why a centre? The idea for a cells was sufficiently developed by those interested in setting up such a body. The university found the wherewithal to fund a chair of European law, and an electoral board was appointed to village. Investigatory conversations with potential candidates began, in particular to inform the electoral committee for the chair. Equally, the university or funding bodies related to it, like the mathematics bodies so well founded by Trinity, and it was decided that four other more junior or short term appointments would be made beneath the chair when the appointment was made there. After all, that produced a number of questions about what cells was to be. What attitudes and opinions should be shown by applicants for the chair in particular in order to sustain academic interest in the field? After all, it was just short of 15 years since the first common market referendum, as it was referred to then, had tested British opinion on the need to maintain the UK as a member state, which showed that two thirds of those voting favourites staying in the European community. Those who wanted an institution where differing views about the communities could stand a reasonable chance of being heard, they were likely to support a grouping within a leading university. After all, opinion remained divided about the wisdom of the UK, maintaining the member state that it had become by legislation in 1972. A different division of attitudes concerned the breadth of the subject matter that the centre would concentrate on. Should it be confined to European community law? Or did it also embrace comparative national and international law? What emphasis should be placed on the harmonisation of national laws or regional laws within member states? Some dozen or so members of the law faculty had shown considerable interest in a broad approach to such questions of scope. The expression European legal studies, which comes after centre, was taken by many to indicate that the Director and the Management Committee of cells should handle differences of opinion about how far to stretch the topics on which conferences or lectures should take place and, importantly, the topics for research should be selected. Behind plans for an institution that would acknowledge the striking course of years from 1990 onwards. Very exciting ones. The socialist states of the Cold War were no longer with us from 1990 onwards, at least not forever and today. Suddenly the political freedoms of the West were more than a dream. West and East Germany, as we all remember, could come together as one federated territory that would rank as a crucial member state of the new Europe. For European legal studies, therefore, the appropriate designation that was not just something informal and an understanding of shared interests which might solidify into closed ties or equally might drift apart. The law teachers of Cambridge included distinguished scholars who were not given to building up separate entities with like-minded colleagues. A visitor might well ask a physical question, and where is the cells? A respondent might point to the basement shell that was being built upon so as to provide what is now the David Williams Law Faculty building. David, I'm sure most of you know, was the law fellow who became President of the University's Wolfson College for 12 years from 1980. He coupled this in 1990 to 1992 with full-time Vice-Chancellor ship of the University of Cambridge as a whole and in the end was enabled to serve 7 years as Vice-Chancellor in that office which was the new period attaching to it for the whole future. It was vital that the setting up of cells that David was there to encourage its formation as only he could. That was equally true of the man who took over chairing the law faculty itself in the early 1990s. John Tiley, the tax law specialist, who later we so sadly lost. Within a few years there was undoubtedly a strong feeling that the University needed or deserved bodies devoting their research and commentary to what Europe was becoming. A project too substantial to be undertaken without acknowledgement of its role in the core of the University. Hence the Centre for European Legal Studies expressed a widely held view that the institution should have in its remit the study of European law whether this meant enactments or other legal expressions, binding acts of the European Community Council, Commission, Court of Justice. It's early summations of its work, that's cells work, which seemed to take the form of Christmas messages at the end of the Micronvist term. In both 1991 and 1992 included projects on the effects of the Maastricht Summit and the Social Charter, teaching European law to professional lawyers, programming lectures by emerging experts in the law of the European Communities who wanted to contribute their ideas through the faculty. There were larger scale meetings on difficult topics such as the two day conference held with Trinity Hall on community law and national courts rights and remedies. That had to wait however until 1994. So pretty strong positive support was being shown from 1990 onwards without much contradiction. In this formative period it was very strongly positive on my reading of the documents that still exist. So let me move on to my second question which is why did I find myself being asked to take on the initial directorship of cells? My background for the task was rather hit and miss. True, I already had some appreciation of how to organise law and foreign language degrees for British students and students from a continental country over a four year period instead of a three, and the foreign section being taken as the second or third year portion of that degree. And it would be a degree in law and languages. For years I'd organised a summer course mainly on English law for foreign law students in London. I'd become familiar with debates about the internal market freedoms for movement of goods and provision of services and the impact of basic principles of community law in that sphere, particularly important. Of course for the wondrous world with intellectual property. Nonetheless I was not a scholar with profound perceptions to impart either on European community law or upon comparative law for whatever purpose it might serve. The main answer to the question why did I become the first cells director was indeed simple. Law teaching was as it so often is polymorphous and as delivered in Cambridge it needed time and space to do it justice. In the 1980s this seemed to have led to a view that the Cambridge LLM programme could not be extended so as to offer lecture courses to graduate students that differed from the European law subject in the undergraduate tripods. In my view that called for reconsideration. And somewhat surprisingly I had already become chair of the faculty's LLM committee, avi assisted by Deborah Rodgerson who was having coffee. And so being of light mind on the question of expanding European law subjects at the graduate level. In a year it was possible to persuade colleagues to put on more specific second level courses in the European community as a new legal order, competition law and law and policy of the single European market. A director for cells who had taken a comparative law course and who arranged courses in foreign law at a continental faculty where British students could pass a year with reciprocal exchanges of students coming from the other faculty. But most of all I was taken to have the time to build up a proposed new centre on a considerable variety of subjects. When approached about getting cells underway I said I would be glad to be involved but since the possibility of financing and filing a Cambridge University chair in European law was becoming over reality I did not wish to stand in the way of the new professor of European law opposed I had neither sufficient wit nor ability to fill. Alan Dashwood was the electoral board's choice as the European law professor and he became free to accept the nomination in January 1995. However he was prepared to take over the directorship of cells from the beginning of the previous Mikkelmuss term in 1994. So in the end label me what you will. A mere gap filler, a better than nothing would be okay in the short term. By 1994 I was in the unenviable position of needing to have both my hips replaced. So I wouldn't be much good for anything in that period. So Alan's willingness to take over cells and give it some real drive in advance of arrival for the European law chair was by then a huge relief to me. Cells was first acknowledged in university documentation as an institution for the future in May 1991 and in the next year and a half its programs began to swell as it clearly had exploratory tasks that helped to give those who wanted to work at cells more than enough to do. It's held many a chance to open doors even when there were financial hurdles or too many people or places who were crowding in on the attractive opportunities. By 1993 the list of subjects being pursued by the new experts either from within or without the programs of the law faculty in lectures, seminars and the writing of books and of theses. A spirit of collaboration seemed to surround it and occasionally synchronization could raise the odd difficulty. Still the David Williams building where we all now are was in course of being finished and was scheduled to provide cells with a home at last on part of its uppermost floor. Other specific things were happening which took a lot of attention from those who are trying to run cells. In the opening of the university year in 1992 the university and the city of Cambridge became involved in organizing a formal opening for cells. The legal affairs committee of the European Parliament expressed their wish to visit the city and university of Cambridge for two days for which it had funded. This committee from the legal affairs from the parliament was in many ways I think equivalent to the House of Lords subcommittee on European law. There was work to be undertaken by them during this sojourn outside normal sighting of community institutions. There was work to be undertaken by the committee itself some 16 of whose members were present here in Cambridge and they had help from our teachers notably Philip Allott, Christopher Greenwood and Eleanor Schacht. The subjects centered around topics the meaning of which deserved a lot of debate. Subsidiarity and proportionality. Legal tools that could lead to interpretation of concepts that members of the legal affairs committee of the EP might find useful as instruments of interpretation and policy formulation. The committee met in an old examination hall near King's College. It was not equipped to provide conference facilities that included interpretation into the various languages used by committee members. The most that could be done was to create equipment cells out of white cloth from which I think I mean sheets behind which the translators carried on their tasks. Much of the discussion was intensive and practical so perhaps not too much was lost by these surrounding circumstances. There were opportunities enough for politicians, national and local and academics to continue conversations between and across themselves. Hospitality blossomed. Cells itself provided worthwhile contributions. An evening reception in the Senate House followed upon a concise and thoughtful lecture by Lord Slinard Hadley entitled What is a European Community Judge? You can read it in the 1993 volume of the Cambridge Law Review. Many people indeed must have read the lecture since. Cells addicts began to appreciate that the centre court after all have a presence, though not perhaps quite yet at that point in time. Prince Philip Duke of Edinburgh, but Chancellor of Cambridge University came up here to top out the structure of the David Williams building. Not completing it entirely but it was standing and it's still standing. He loved to backhander in the direction of Lord Foster, the architect, by describing the building as a good place for growing tomatoes. In the following year he accompanied Her Majesty when she came finally to open the building as a whole that that included recognising that Cells was already here up in that nice corner. It was quite an intriguing occasion because she in particular I think likes to talk to very small numbers of people as she goes round the reception. So there were points where the greatest professors, one or two, talked about English common law, European law, international law in full at separate desks. But there was one that I've left out of the list and it was labelled horse racing and the law. And it was immensely popular. That bit of interviewing went on for some time. And I think with that happening one can say the first phase of Cells's life was a worthwhile occasion and doesn't need to say more. Thank you.