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This occasion brings strongly to mind the original founding of what is now one of the most prestigious international law events in London, the F.A. Mann Annual Lecture. The Lecture was founded in his honor by Francis Mann's law partners, but not without the application of some persistence and determination before they could persuade him to agree. In the end, he gave in, but only on one condition-that the lecturer was not to be allowed to say anything about him. It then became a favorite sport, in the early years, to watch how the first lecturers, personages all of great distinction, found increasingly elegant ways of evading the prohibition!
Ed Cummings should not be allowed to get off so lightly. May I confine what I say about him to two things. The first is something that Ed, with his great modesty, would not grasp unless I said it. So let me say how deeply privileged I feel to have been asked to join you, his colleagues and countrymen and women, in thinking and talking collectively about some of the subjects that he regarded as important throughout his professional career, and subjects the importance of which could hardly have been brought home more vividly to us all than in the recent past and anxious present.
The second is to refer to the one quality which most struck me when I first met Ed Cummings (so far back that I no longer remember when) namely his straightness, that open and upright directness that spoke then (as it still does now) of his military background, but also of the fact that he saw the law as an honorable and, above all, principled profession, so that law and war-or law and the military profession-should fit naturally together. It's a welcome and refreshing world view, and one worth reminding ourselves of. Nothing could be more damaging-both for law and for war alike-than that they should be regarded (as in that Manichaean world beloved of journalists and, alas, too many academics) as sworn enemies, locked in an inextricable conflict of their own. Perhaps the worst thing I can say about Ed Cummings is that he sometimes saw things too straight, and clear, and bright, while the rest of us were bowed...