Preface: twenty years of ERA

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It gives me great pleasure to be able to congratulate ERA on its 20th anniversary. At home I have a daughter who is twenty, and she is lovely. In ERA, I have another close friend at the age of twenty, and this, too is a most admirable friend. ERA is, first of all, an academy, but without being academic. ERA is an institution for training, for exchange of experience and ideas, and a forum for debate and interaction. ERA draws on the expertise of legal professionals from many different fields and functions—including people from academia but not limited to them—and it brings together audiences from a variety of legal professions, in order to develop and enrich their knowledge and competencies. ERA is characterised by multi-professionalism in its field of activity, and this is one of its major assets. Secondly, ERA is a European academy. It is today truly cross-European, not just in terms of the reach of its activities in the various Member States, but also in terms of its ability to engage experts and high-level representatives from the European institutions to bring their contributions to the activities and events in the programme. This combination of multiculturalism, multi-professionalism and “multi-levelism” in ERA’s activity is, together with the quality of the programmes, the essence of its contribution to European legal training and debate. The value added is, I think, beyond doubt at this point in ERA’s still relatively short but quite impressive history. Thirdly, and essentially of course, ERA is an academy of law, European law. As we all know, European Union law has evolved into a special kind of legal order,