Speech to welcome Dr Roberta Metsola, President of the European Parliament

Abstract

Welcome Dr Metsola, in a way it’s welcome back since you are a former student and graduand from this very same Faculty. I assure you that a lot has changed since your days here; I am curious when the last time you set foot here was What has changed, you may ask? Not the tiles or the doors downstairs (you would not know this floor because it was built about ten years ago). Most of the people have changed too, Admin moved on. The academics: Prof Ian Refalo retired less than a year ago, we had a special ceremony for him in this very room last June; on the other hand Prof Tonio Borg, Dr Austin Bencini, Prof Patrick Galea, Prof Simone Borg, Prof Ray Mangion (who could not be here because his daughter graduates MD today), Dr David Fabri, Dr David Zammit, Judge Lawrence Quintano are still here. There are many new faces and names and I promise you that we have a lot of inhouse experts and also very hard working people, we are over twenty full time academics now, and we have changed the Faculty possibly beyond recognition. We have experts in IT Law, in EU Law, Public International Law, Environmental Law.. Medical Law… you name it. Nowadays we are a proper Faculty within a University, not a number of court-goers (nothing wrong with that of course) who come and deliver a few lectures. We publish (I don’t know whether you noticed the books on display, they are all written by us, the academics, a far cry from when I was a student and the only book available was Government Liability by the late Judge Wallace Gulia and History of the Constitution since 1813 by Judge Professor JJ Cremona! We are proud of our books, we contribute to journals, we win projects (we have two MCST projects for example, and Dr David Zammit had won a project too now completed while Prof Ivan Sammut won the Jean Monnet Chair which is why we have been trying to invite you for so long. We also win some consultancy work, report writing for different entities, we are even in the process (subject to a number of hitches) of setting up our own journal (a new for the Faculty of Laws).