Good evening everybody and welcome to this year's annual Mackenzie Stewart lecture.

To remind you, this lecture was created in honour of the memory of Lord Mackenzie Stewart, who was the first Scottish advocate, then a Scottish judge,

and then the first UK judge at the European Court of Justice.

And his achievement was to secure the legal integration of the UK into the EC as it

then was. When the UK joined the EC, a lot of woesayers predicted marrying a common law system

with a civil law system can never work. And with

Jean-Pierre Warner, the first British Advocate General, he had the daunting responsibility of showing

that it could. And between them, they did. And it was accepted by everybody that it was done with complete success to the extent

that McKenzie Stewart became president of the court in 1984, a post he held until his retirement

in 1988. And in an obituary, Lord Cameron of Loch Bruins said his work as a judge of the Court of Justice was marked by his deeply held convictions about the way forward in Europe derived not only from his wartime experiences but also from his sense of a legal and historical communion between the law of Scotland and

the other European systems of law.

He started his life as an engineer and one of his jobs was building bridges during the war time and he's remembered as a bridge

builder in a double sense, a builder of mechanical ones initially and then at a public level

a bridge builder between the UK and Europe and at a private level between himself and his family and their

many friends. And we're very glad to welcome tonight, three members of his family, Judy

Mackenzie Stewart, Amanda Hay and Marianna Hay as representative of the family. Working here, we would

also like to welcome James Weber, representative of Sherman and Sterling, who are generous enough

to sponsor the lecture. And I was looking forward to saying to him, we look forward to eating the dinner you're paying for tonight,

but unfortunately he's had to pull out, so I can't say that.

Our distinguished speaker tonight is Judge Nicholas Forward.

He is a Cambridge man, and like Mackenzie Stewart he started his time as an

engineer reading the fast-track engineering course and then changing to law.

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