The Centre of Construction Law & Dispute Resolution was launched in July 1987 to run a two-year, part-time course in construction law and took in its first cohorts of students in September of the same year. Since that time, the course has continued to operate, with just a few tweaks, on the same basis as in the first year: lectures and tutorials up to April, exams in May, and thereafter preparation for the dissertation to be presented in September, the second anniversary of the start of the course. The student composition has remained the same, being of mixed professions extending from lawyers, barristers and solicitors, architects, and surveyors and to every sort of engineering discipline. This mixture was inherited from the Society for Construction Law, founded five years earlier, which had established, beyond question, that interest in the subject was spread evenly across all the professions involved in the construction process. It was the Centre which was the first to put this interest onto the firm academic footing from which it has now expanded to cover the whole construction world.