On 7 and 8 December 2007, a group of legal theorists got together to celebrate, but also critically discuss, Neil MacCormick’s latest book, arguably his magnum opus, Institutions of Law: An Essay in Legal Theory (MacCormick 2007). This collection is a direct result of that meeting, which was generously sponsored by the Leverhulme Trust, and held at the School of Law, University of Edinburgh. There had been a previous occasion, and also a previous collection (see Bankowski and MacLean 2006), where a chapter of MacCormick’s earlier Rhetoric and the Rule of Law (MacCormick 2005) was discussed, but the publication of this book was clearly an event that merited its own careful attention.