ABSTRACT
I first met Henrik Zahle in Florence, where we were the only two lawyers at a conference on ‘Complexity’. We immediately became friends. Later, I corresponded with him about his admirable work on legal polycentricity. Later still, in the autumn of 2005, we shared a desk in Bentham House at University College London. He was working on evidence, about which we had several interesting discussions. However, one day I floated some half-formed thoughts about the idea of ‘surface law’. The starting-point was the suggestion that Alan Watson’s thesis about legal transplants was both important and plausible, but that it only dealt with ‘surface law’. This did not mean that Watson’s thesis was superficial, but what did it mean? Henrik was interested. He encouraged me to develop the basic idea and invited me to contribute a paper on the subject to a conference he was organizing. I accepted the invitation because I hoped to continue our conversations in Copenhagen. Like many others, I was shocked by the news of his illness and premature death. I dedicate this modest contribution to his memory. It was he who encouraged me to develop the ideas, but I am very conscious that it misses the critical insights that he had promised me. At least, like the first site of our relationship, it conveys a message of complexity.
