On Friday, 4th March 2011 a conference was held at the National Museum of Iceland entitled “Law and Justice in Community” (you can see the conference programme here). It was devoted to the discussion of themes and issues arising from a homonymous volume published in August 2010 by Oxford University Press (you can see the publisher’s leaflet about the book here) and authored by Professors Timothy Murphy and Garrett Barden of the University of Akureyri. The conference hosted the authors of the book as well as leading Icelandic legal experts and scholars. It is an honour for our journal to be able to publish: papers and a statement resulting from the speeches  held at the conference; a book review by Icelandic ethicist and political philosopher Guðmundur Heiðar Frímansson; and a response to some of these texts penned by Prof. Garrett Barden himself.

The editors of this journal believe that the themes and issues discussed at the conference and in the volume by Professors Murphy and Barden will prove of interest to our readers at large, not only for the patent Nordic origin of the conference, but also and above all for the universal appeal of the questions addressed, such as the aims and nature of justice, authority, legitimacy, and the common good. Moreover, the book’s rootedness within classical jurisprudence and the references to Francophone sources as well as to our journal should make this special issue of Nordicum-Mediterraneum appealing to readers steeped in Mediterranean legal and political cultures.

Moreover, the editors of this journal wish to join Professor Róbert R. Spanó, Dean of the Faculty of Law of the University of Iceland, in welcoming the conference and, we shall add, this journal, as instances of fruitful cooperation between the public universities of Iceland.