Tribute to professor Brian Bercusson.

• Author: Gould, William B., IV
• Position: Stanford Law School - Interview

This issue of the Stanford Law & Policy Review--devoted to some of the papers delivered at the Second International Standards Conference at Stanford Law School on August 14 and 15, 2009--is dedicated to the memory of Professor Brian Bercusson of London. Until his death on August 17, 2008, Professor Bercusson had been one of my collaborators in organizing the conference and he was scheduled to deliver a paper here last year.

Brian Bercusson was one of the brightest and best of the European labor lawyers and law professors in the past century and in this one as well. I first met Brian in 1975 when he was a Research Fellow at Christ's College and I was based at Churchill College as a Visiting Scholar. For more than three decades, he was that rarest of individuals who was first-rate professionally and simultaneously full of personal warmth and good-natured wit. In the 1980s, we had considerable contact at the European University Institute in Florence, Italy where twice I visited at his invitation. We renewed and strengthened our friendship and worked together here at Stanford Law School where he was Visiting Professor of Law in 2002 and a Visiting Scholar in 2007.

Professor Bercusson was an original and independent thinker, writing extensively in articles and books about British labor law and European labor law, publishing the leading book, European Labour Law, in 1996. As the Guardian noted, this work became the "seminal text" and the "most comprehensive treatment of the subject he helped to create." Brian, subsequent to his work as a professor at the European University Institute, returned to a chair in European law at...