On the occasion of its 50th Anniversary, the T.M.C. Asser Instituut proudly presents this collection of scholarly articles written by its staff members and some of its external research partners and friends. Celebrating a jubilee should also be a forward-looking event. This book represents the Institute’s fields of expertise at a moment of reflection on its work so far and on its plans for the next decade. Emily Rosenberg characterized the era of 1870–1945 as “A World Connecting”, which produced great achievements but also horrifying crimes against humanity. Tobias Asser was one of the great Dutch scholars of private and public international law, who—with remarkable foresight—grasped the need to embed relations of power in an evolving legal order, with processes of negotiation, arbitration and adjudication. Tobias Asser, himself a child of the Jewish emancipation, was always aware of the importance that the law should do justice to every citizen across imagined or real borders. The Hague Conference on Private International Law, the establishment of international arbitration and jurisdiction, and the Hague Peace Conference are interrelated results of Asser’s mission. Together they embody a vision of international relations based upon the rule of law. The horrors of war and genocide in the twentieth century appear to have shattered Asser’s achievements, but in the end they survived the horrors of that time and developed into the present mosaic of international legal institutions based in The Hague.