The reason why we consciously deviated from the classic idea of a Festschrift was
not the lack of candidates among Bussani’s colleagues and friends—quite the
contrary. The circle of Bussani’s scientific acquaintances includes so many scholarly
VIP that we would only have had the problem of fitting them all in a limited number
of pages. The reason why we abandoned the usual structure of a Festschrift was that
we wanted to give justice to an oft-forgotten dimension of the job of a legal scholar
and university professor, that of mentoring young people.2 By ‘mentoring’ we refer
to scholars’ and professors’ capacity of fostering junior colleagues’ and students’
talents, channeling their abilities, and nurturing their potential to become successful
and good professionals (if not better human beings) (Allen and Eby 2010).