It was at this meeting in Bellagio, Italy, in 1981, that the First Congress of the Commission on Folk Law and Legal Pluralism took place. While the Commission was established in 1978 by the Union of Anthropological and Ethnological Sciences (IUAES) and affiliated with the International Association of Legal Science (IALS), on the initiative of Professor van den Steenhoven of the Institute of Folk Law, Nijmegen (Netherlands) it was not until 1981 that it took shape. The 1981 meeting created the foundation upon which the Commission was based, bringing together leading scholars in law and humanities across the world to discuss how scholarship and research dealing with plural legal orders in a variety of settings (South and North) could be addressed. 

The debates that formed the focus for the Congresses’ discussions were later published by Foris in 1985 in a book entitled People’s Law and State Law: The Bellagio Papers, edited by Anthony Allott and Gordon Woodman. The interdisciplinary, empirical work that these scholars promoted contributed to the development of the Journal of Legal Pluralism and Unofficial Law, now the Journal of Legal Pluralism and Critical Social Analysis. Since the meeting in Bellagio, the Commission has organised over twenty international symposia, in places such as Thailand, Indonesia, South Africa, Ghana, Russia, India, Canada, the former Yugoslavia, Switzerland and the UK. It continues to engage with new developments in the field of legal pluralism, such as the interaction of legal pluralism with science and technology, environmental governance, human rights, securitization, and audit cultures.

As a founder member of the Commission on Legal Pluralism, Fons Strijbosch, who acted as its Executive Secretary from 1981 until 2000, has written a deeply personal account of his experiences in Bellagio. It touches on persons who went on to become Presidents of the Commission, including Marc Galanter, Harald Finkler, Gordon Woodman, and Keebet von Benda-Beckmann. While his account of proceedings in Bellagio is grounded in the past, his form of academic narrative is fused together within a literary genre that goes beyond a simple, historical account of what took place, to a broader, more existential account of personal, human experience that reflects on academic trajectories that are not confined to the Bellagio moment in time and space.  
Since taking early retirement from academic life at the age of fifty-seven, Fons Strijbosch has established another career as a writer/novelist and journalist. 

Commentary by Anne Griffiths, Professor Emeritus, Edinburgh University, School of Law.